Competing Discourses of Farm Animal Welfare and Agri-food Restructuring [Editorial]

Abstract

In the past twenty years, growing attention has been given to human–animal relationships in the social sciences and in the humanities (Kalof and Fitzgerald 2007). Most of this literature has been concerned with constructing a historical understanding of the ways in which animals have been cared for or mistreated by humans (Franklin 1999; Eder 1996). Recent studies have underlined how attitudes and emotions involving animals range from those of love and compassion (Haraway 2008; Serpell 1986) to inattention and indifference (Fudge 2002a, 2002b) to violence and power (Adams 1990). Erica Fudge (2002a) reminds us that as humans we have placed different animals into different categories, according to notions of species, usefulness, domesticity or wildness. As a result of these varying and often contested orderings, animals are assigned to particular places and spaces. In this special issue, we turn our attention to the places and spaces inhabited by farm animals and the practices humans engage with them. The contributors of this special issue explore, from different disciplines and perspectives, the complex entanglements of human and non-human animals in practices of animal science research, farming, market

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