What do you mean by "changing consumer patterns" in order to increase animal welfare? Do you mean going vegan or only buying from small farms?
I mean perceiving an animal product as something you actively choose to use, or even a luxury, instead of a default.
Right now most people would see meat, milk and eggs and part of their staple diet. Theyâre part of the food pyramids we call get taught, and thereâs usually at least one of them in every meal. Because theyâre seen as default, thereâs a strong pressure to get them as cheap as possible, to make staples affordable for everyone, and this is why and how practices like factory farming came about. People have to eat, and itâs hard to care a whole lot about various welfare implications of different food production systems when youâre overworked and desperately trying to feed yourself and your dependents.Â
It is tempting to see high welfare foods - free range meat, permaculture products, kind milk etc- as somewhat elitist, upper class, etc products. And from a certain point of view, they are. At least, right now. Factory farm systems have been slow to improve animal welfare in part because doing so reduces their profitability. The more space you afford an individual animal, the less animals you can fit on your property and the less money you make.
But, if consumers are willing to pay more for a product, take free range eggs for example, then producing that product starts to look more profitable. When you have a demand, supply will attempt to meet it.
You canât realistically just go and close all the factory farms or other poorer welfare production systems out there overnight. The animals have to go somewhere, and they still supply a huge amount of food and people need to eat. But as thereâs more demand for higher welfare production, the supply will change to reflect that.
For some, that means forking out the extra money for free range meat, kind milk, free range eggs, etc. For some it will mean going and buying directly from producers, so they know what sort of production system theyâre paying for, or even producing their own food so they can control it directly. For some that will mean not using certain animal products, or animal products at all, because they donât feel that any production system would have good enough welfare. And all of those choices are fine.Â
Society as a whole spending less on low welfare products and being willing to spend more on high welfare products will absolutely change those production systems over time. But not everyone is in a position to make that change immediately and shouldnât feel guilty about only doing what they can do.
Even if one just wanted to change the system within a farm, the animals that are used to that system are generally themselves not well off in the new system.
So say a dairy farmer wanted to renovate their barn from tie-housing (where the cows are tied up in their beds, called cubicles) to loose housing. The cows from the tied housing system are used to having all of the food they could want to eat right in front of them, and the guarantee of their own cubicle as they are already standing in it. Whereas a loose housing system, often has a feeding area with limited spots so not all cows may eat at the exact same time which results in some competition among cows, and even though there are cubicles for every cow, a cow may have to walk the whole length of the barn to lie down. One can imagine how a tied cow, that has always had access to food, must would have to cope with the sudden competition of getting a food spot in the loose housing system. Not to mention that they are not used to the exercise of having to walk to their cubicles from the feeding area. I feel that that would be similar to having to walk to buy oneâs groceries when one usually has them delivered (or access to a car).















