Animal protection as animal welfare & anti-cruelty

The EU seal products ban

By Judith Renner

International animal protection politics is structured by two specific strategies, anti-cruelty and animal welfare, which constitute our knowledge of what animal protection means.

Animal protection has gained considerable relevance in social and political debates. Whether it is the systematic killing of unwanted male chicks in laying hen production, the conduction of painful scientific experiments on dogs or chimpanzees, or the cruel treatment of greyhounds kept for racing, social debates abound on how these animals should be protected and the cruel practices terminated or tamed through legal regulations. In contrast to the societal salience of the topic, animal protection has hardly ever been critically analysed as a relevant and specific field of international politics. With this article, which is part of a Special September 2023 Issue of International Relations 37(3)  that seeks to make animals visible in IR,  I set out to introduce animal protection as a relevant issue of international politics. Animal protection is important, I argue, as it is here that human-animal relations are governed on a national, regional and global scale. It is where the animal is constituted as a relevant object of political regulation and a ‘proper’ human conduct towards animals is negotiated. Analysing international animal protection politics therefore contributes to understanding and critically assessing the construction and government of human animal relations on a global scale.

Caged chickens under grow lights. By Punghi courtesy of Shutterstock.

Anti-cruelty and animal welfare

In the article I suggest a way to analyse international animal protection politics and argue that this field is structured by two specific strategies, anti-cruelty and animal welfare, which constitute our knowledge of what animal protection means, how it can be achieved and how humans can and should more generally relate to animals. I analyse animal protection in two steps: in a first historical part, I reconstruct the emergence of the anti-cruelty and animal welfare strategies in 19th and 20th century Great Britain and delineate their typical features. In a second part, I examine how these two strategies are at work in international animal protection politics today by looking at the EU’s politics in regard to the trade in seal products and how they were shaped by the strategies of anti-cruelty and animal welfare.

Anti-cruelty and animal welfare emerged in 19th and 20th century Great Britain, which is usually considered the cradle of modern animal protection thinking. Both strategies construe quite distinct ways of what animal protection is and how it can be reached. Anti-cruelty emerged as the first animal protection discourse in the early 19th century. Itstarted as the problematisation of specific working class practices for leisure and for work, such as bull-baiting, the treatment of cattle at markets or the use of dog-carts. Later in the century, the cruel poor was succeeded by the cruel woman wearing feathers or whole birds on her hat, and by the cruel vivisecting scientist carrying out his gruesome business cold-heartedly to further his image and gain medical knowledge. I show how in all three cases, animal protection as anti-cruelty emerged as a disciplining project which was imagined as the taming of exceptionally cruel subjects through the legal prohibition of their cruel practices. Simultaneously, it emerged as a larger legitimizing project which ignores and thereby legitimates the general societal uses and treatments of animals that were not deemed to be cruel.

Animal welfare and anti-cruelty were competing frames in the debates on the EU’s policies and, while animal welfare seemed to become dominant at first, anti-cruelty eventually came to shape EU politics. As a consequence, the anti-cruelty strategy turned the EU’s politics on seal hunting into a moral project.

Animal welfare took quite a different path and emerged as a strategy which constructs animal protection not as the legal prohibition of exceptionally cruel treatments of animals by humans, but as the meticulous standardisation of the conditions of animal use along the lines of scientific knowledge about particular species’ stress levels. When in the 1960s the British government tried to react to heated social protests against intensive farming, the animal welfare concept, which had been developed in scientific circles since the 1920s, served as a welcome tool to decouple animal agriculture from moral accusations of cruelty and introduce a more technical perspective on animal protection. Here, the animal welfare strategy, centrally developed by the Brambell Committee, constructed the causing of avoidable suffering, understood as the discomfort, stress and pain of animals, as the central criterion of unacceptable treatments. Stress was understood as the relation between animals and their environment, and animal welfare suggested that depending on specific animal species’ stress levels, animal environments, including housing, food and disease prevention, had to be controlled in order to avoid stress and, hence, treat the animal in an acceptable way. With animal welfare, thus, the focus of animal protection shifted from the human to the animal understood more or less in terms of a biological machine defined by a particular liability to certain stress factors. Moreover, animal welfare brings into focus the regulation of animals’ material living conditions, as they are seen as the key to a better or worse balance of animal stress and, thus, animal welfare.  

Complex legacies

The two strategies of anti-cruelty and animal welfare are historical. However, they also shape animal protection knowledge today and thus can serve as a helpful interpretive lens with which to analyze contemporary international animal protection politics. I use them as such in my analysis of the EU’s politics in regard to the trade in seal products which, starting with a 1983 Council Directive, culminated in Council Regulation 1007/2009 which imposed a blanket ban on all kinds of seal products derived from commercial hunting. The ban is outstanding among the EU’s policies in regard to animal protection, as the EU here deviated from its usual path of regulation and standardization and instead opted for a comprehensive ban of the trade in seal products. The decision can be understood, however, when animal welfare and anti-cruelty are drawn on as interpretive tools. Animal welfare and anti-cruelty were competing frames in the debates on the EU’s policies and, while animal welfare seemed to become dominant at first, anti-cruelty eventually came to shape EU politics. As a consequence, the anti-cruelty strategy turned the EU’s politics on seal hunting into a moral project and lead to the construction of antagonistic identities of a morally superior EU which had to tame the cruel seal-hunting countries by means of a comprehensive legal ban. The strong moral tones of anti-cruelty also dominated the later construction of the case in the context of the WTO and made it possible for the EU for the first time to establish an animal protection issue as the protection of public morals under Article XX (a) of GATT, which can serve as a precedent in the future.

Judith Renner is Senior Lecturer in Politics, Potsdam University, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences.

This article is original content published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.