Consumers’ meat commitment and the importance of animal welfare as agricultural policy goal

Abstract

Animal welfare is one of the key agricultural policy goals and is considered extremely important by consumers. With the increasing urgency for a sustainable and healthy dietary shift, it could be one of the key motivators for behaviour change. Therefore, we investigate how consumers perceive the importance of animal welfare not only as an agricultural policy goal but also in comparison to conflicting goals, such as domestic food production, farmers’ income, and consumer prices. We investigate how the weighing of animal welfare as an agricultural policy goal is related to individual behaviour (i.e. meat consumption), values and attitudes, such as meat commitment, the perceptions of farmers and the Ecological Welfare scale (which includes animal welfare and environment protection). Thus, we conducted an online survey in October 2022, recruiting a sample of 1542 participants (51.5% women) in equal parts from the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland. Participants were asked to evaluate the importance of increased animal welfare in three situations with the following conflicting policy goals: (1) increasing domestic food production, (2) reducing consumer food prices, and (3) increasing farm incomes. Regression analysis revealed that the influential predictors in all three models were similar. Being a woman, politically left leaning, and less committed to meat eating, having a more negative perception of farmers, and assigning more importance to ethical food consumption increased the probability of putting more weight on animal welfare in all three goal conflicts described above. The finding that participants who were more committed to meat eating tended to assign less importance to animal welfare when weighing the three conflicting agricultural policy goals is well-aligned with the current literature. Implications for agricultural policy are discussed.