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Australian Community Values and Layer Hen Welfare

Published: August 23, 2022
By: R. A. ANKENY 1 and R. PAXTON 2 / 1 School of Humanities and Food Values Research Group, University of Adelaide; 2 Food Values Research Group, University of Adelaide.
Summary

This paper summarizes key findings of a project performed with funding from Australian Eggs Ltd. in order to better understand how Australian community members apply values when considering key animal welfare issues in commercial egg production (Ankeny and Paxton, 2020). The main goal of the project was to gain a deeper understanding of the relative acceptability or unacceptability of various practices and developments in commercial egg production in Australia. A mixed qualitative and quantitative study was conducted to assess how community values are applied to difficult decisions involving outcomes for animal welfare, human health, and environmental sustainability. We focus in this paper on those findings likely to be of most interest to those engaging in avian health research. We found that members of the Australian community hold diverse views about animal welfare, reflected in varied prioritisation of animal welfare goals and expectations about how these are best achieved. Overall, meeting basic needs, permitting freedom to choose, and providing the hens with care and protection represented the highest welfare priorities for the majority of research participants. Animal welfare was nearly always prioritised ahead of environmental outcomes, in part because egg production was perceived as being relatively sustainable compared with other industries.

Our findings have broader implications for how research about hen welfare is framed and communicated to the general public, particularly because research participants tended not to revise their preferences in light of new knowledge or information. In addition, it is clear that care needs to be taken when designing research tools to explore animal welfare, given the tensions revealed between how members of the Australian community think and reason about animal welfare and their ‘gut feelings’ when making value judgements related to animal welfare. Finally, research participants tended to have different understandings of key terms related to animal welfare in comparison to how they are typically used in animal welfare science. Terms such as ‘choice,’ ‘light,’ and ‘space,’ which are likely to be understood by animal scientists and those in the egg industry as objective and measurable, tended to be valuebased for study respondents. This finding suggests that such terms may have considerable impact when used in research or communications with members of the Australian community, and have considerable potential to result in miscommunication and misunderstandings.

I. INTRODUCTION
Most Australian households consume large numbers of eggs on an annual basis, but we know very little about what members of the broader community think about the practices associated with commercial egg production and the underlying values that they bring to these considerations. A previous study for Australian Eggs (Fisher et al., 2019) examined the values-based elements underlying the consensus in animal science across key areas related to laying hen welfare, and suggested how these values-based elements could be better exposed and examined to open the way for additional and new ways of researching key areas of hen welfare. This work revealed that there are numerous decisions associated with commercial egg production that require consideration of a balance of factors including both the best available scientific data and also community expectations and values. The study described in this paper also complemented ongoing studies done by CSIRO researchers for Australian Eggs focused on their Sustainability Framework and its implementation which provide data on community attitudes about commercial egg production (Moffat et al., 2018, 2019).
The current research project sought to explore community values underlying animal welfare in commercial egg production, and particularly where values might be in tension with current industry practices. This study explored how members of the Australian community weighed up different desirable (or undesirable) animal welfare outcomes and investigated the values that underlie public expectations regarding such outcomes. The current research explores community values underlying animal welfare in commercial egg production, with a particular focus on where values might be in tension with current practices in the industry, via focus on the following questions:
  • What values issues related to animal welfare, environment, and human health in commercial egg production are most relevant to various types of people within the Australian community?
  • How do various types of people within the Australian community apply values and express, explain and justify such application of values in situations where trade-offs between animal welfare, environmental, and human health outcomes exist?
  • What are the impacts of these value applications on preferences for, or acceptability of, developments in commercial egg production in Australia?
It is critical to understand how values associated with layer hen welfare compare to and are weighed up against other valued outcomes, for instance the potential effects of egg production on human health and environmental sustainability, particularly where values may be in conflict and where there is no objectively or scientifically correct answer. Such potentially conflicting values are a key challenge for the Australian egg industry as it continues to strive to meet community expectations regarding what is acceptable animal welfare.
II. METHOD
Most people are familiar with making decisions based on trade-offs in their day-to-day lives but may find it difficult to articulate the processes that they use when doing so. Trade-offs that involve moral choices are particularly difficult to make, and are even more tricky to consider in contexts where most people are not likely to have deep knowledge about the underlying practices, or may have never thought about the issues at stake in any detail, as in the case of weighing up and trading off different animal welfare outcomes in relation to their underlying values.
Hence this project used two primary approaches to explore the key research questions, qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods are used to gain rich or detailed knowledge about people’s thoughts, attitudes, or opinions, and allow a deeper dive into the problems or questions of interest. They can be used as exploratory research, and hence provide hypotheses that can be used as the basis of future quantitative research, but also can be used to better understand quantitative results. Qualitative methods are particularly useful when seeking to understand not just what people think, but what the reasons are underlying opinions or views, and the relations between various parts of people’s worldviews and values. Although statistical methods cannot be utilised to determine the validity or reliability of qualitative research, there are well-established methods for making certain that qualitative results are high-quality and rigorous (e.g., see Lincoln and Guba, 1999), which include but are not limited to making certain to control for researcher or other biases, engaging in ongoing critical reflection on methods as data is collected and analysed, coding of data including comparison by multiple researchers to ensure consistency, clear and consistent decision-making throughout the processes of collection and analysis, and repetition of data collection in order to ensure that different perspectives are represented until saturation occurs (namely no new themes emerge in subsequent research).
In this study, qualitative methods were used at two stages in the process. First, community-level focus groups were carried out at the start of the project to establish an overview of community priorities for layer hen welfare, including the diverse range of views held by members of the public. Focus groups were also used as a final stage in the overall research in order to deepen understandings of quantitative survey results, with a particular focus on how different sectors within the community make value trade-offs and how they respond to making difficult decisions between valued animal welfare outcomes.
Quantitative research is typically used to generate data that can be transformed into usable statistics, particularly to be able to generalise results from a sample to a larger group or even the general population. Questions tend to be close ended, and data generated can include attitudes, opinions, behaviours, or other defined variables, from which patterns or correlations are sought. The quality of quantitative research results can be measured using a range of statistical techniques, but the main goal is to assess how well the methods used measured whatever was of interest. Most quantitative research is assessed in terms of reliability (the consistency of a measure, in other words the extent to which the results can be reproduced if the research were to be repeated under the same conditions) and validity (the extent to which the results really measure what they are supposed to measure).
In this project, we performed a large-scale representative survey of Australian community values and value trade-offs between different potential animal welfare outcomes, and analysed the data to determine patterns in animal welfare priorities within members of the Australian community as well as whether consistent underlying values can be identified that are drivers of these priorities.
When performed correctly, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques permits better understanding of the research questions and the data generated than any one method on its own, and this approach is known as ‘mixed methods research.’ Such an approach allows researchers to gain more depth and breadth in their understanding of the data, as well as corroboration of findings across various methods used. Most importantly, mixed methods allow the weaknesses inherent in each approach performed on its own to be offset, for instance via triangulation (use of several means or methods to explore the same phenomenon or question of interest) together with careful and reflective analysis about the types of data produced using each method, and the strengths and limitations of each method. This project relied on this type of mixed methods approach in order to produce both a much richer context for understanding what might sometimes appear to be contradictory community responses to various types of egg production practices, as well as actionable findings pointing to areas that require more research, improved communication and transparency, and more public and industry consideration and debate.
III. RESULTS
According to results of our representative survey, members of the Australian community overwhelmingly considered protecting the welfare of chickens in commercial egg production in Australia to be an important issue (mean score = 5.84 on a seven-point scale where 1= not important and 7 = very important). Over half (58%) of survey respondents also agreed that animal welfare is a main influence on their choice of whether or not to buy eggs, or of which types of eggs to buy. A similar number (56%) of respondents believed that most people make efforts to buy eggs produced under high animal welfare conditions. Overall, the majority of survey respondents signalled that layer hen welfare is a moral issue, although they were mixed in their perceptions of whether it is morally right or wrong to negatively affect the quality of life for layer hens in order to produce reasonably priced eggs. The belief that negatively affecting animal welfare in order to produce reasonably priced eggs is absolutely morally wrong was also significantly correlated with lower levels of measured knowledge about commercial egg production in Australia.
Our findings from both the community survey and focus groups revealed that members of the Australian community hold diverse views about animal welfare, which are reflected in varied prioritisation of animal welfare goals and expectations about how these are best achieved. Community members expected layer hens’ basic needs to be fulfilled as a minimal welfare requirement. Some research participants considered access to an outdoor range to be a basic need and right for layer hens and resisted the idea that good welfare could be achieved without such access. However, among community members who held more moderate views, it was important that hens have the freedom to choose how and where they spend their time. Overall, meeting basic needs, permitting freedom to choose, and providing the hens with care and protection represented the highest welfare priorities for the majority of research participants. Notably in both the survey and focus groups, research participants nearly always prioritised animal welfare ahead of environmental outcomes, in part because egg production was perceived as being relatively sustainable compared with other industries.
In order to examine why different animal welfare, human health, and environmental sustainability preferences may exist within the Australian community, we assessed the tendencies among survey respondents to anthropomorphise layer hens, that is, their tendencies to believe that layer hens possess qualities traditionally associated with human beings such as a humanlike mind, free will, intentions, consciousness, and emotions (this description of anthropomorphism, its constituent categories, and the method for assessing individual tendencies to anthropomorphise, were derived from work by Waytz et al., 2010).
Overall, survey respondents tended to agree that hens possessed anthropomorphic qualities, although they disagreed about the extent to which they possessed these qualities. Across all anthropomorphism questions, survey respondents scored on average 30.38 out of a possible 55 on the anthropomorphism scale, with only a small percentage of respondents located at either extreme of the scale. Respondents were somewhat more likely to believe that hens have consciousness and experience emotions than they were to attribute free will to hens.
Respondents who tended to anthropomorphise layer hens were significantly more likely to prefer outcomes that they viewed as providing hens with more natural living conditions and improved emotional well-being. While the tendency to anthropomorphise layer hens was also associated with greater knowledge of commercial egg production, increased knowledge was not strongly associated with a preference for outcomes affecting particular categories of animal welfare. Research participants also tended not to revise their preferences in light of new knowledge or information, although this did more infrequently occur in the deliberative focus group setting. Somewhat surprisingly, there were also no consistent differences in the trade-off preferences of survey respondents living in urban and rural areas, or according to most demographic indicators, with the exception of age and gender.
A core purpose of this research was to investigate how members of the Australian community decide between conflicting animal welfare outcomes in trade-off situations. Tradeoffs occur in situations where the benefits gained by choosing one outcome necessarily means that the benefits of another outcome are reduced. In the online survey, we asked respondents to indicate their degree of preference in a range of trade-off scenarios (using a scale from 1 = strong preference for option A to 7 = strong preference for option B). Each scenario described a trade-off situation between two outcomes related to animal welfare, human health, or environmental sustainability. Overall, survey respondents’ preferences for the major categories of layer hen welfare (i.e., biological function, affective state, and natural living) were relatively mixed. Nevertheless, members of the Australian community tended to have moderate or strong preferences for welfare outcomes that provided layer hens with what they viewed as more natural living conditions or improved their emotional experiences over physical health outcomes.
While members of the Australian community also expressed mixed preferences in trade-offs between animal welfare, human health, and environmental sustainability, a critical finding is that animal welfare was always prioritised ahead of environmental outcomes in our survey data. The most notable example of this preference involves a trade-off between improving hens’ affective states by providing enough space for them to relax without interruption and limiting the use of land and energy resources. In this trade-off scenario, nearly three-quarters of respondents preferred to improve animal welfare, while relatively few had no preference or prioritised potential environmental outcomes. Considering the mix of responses as to whether Australian egg producers are perceived as environmentally responsible, it is unclear whether the low priority accorded to environmental outcomes is due to a belief that egg production does not (overly) impact environmental sustainability or to some other set of beliefs. For trade-offs between layer hen welfare and human health, survey respondents tended to accept risks to hens’ biological function and forgo opportunities to improve their affective states in order to protect human health. However, providing the hens with a natural living environment in which they have space to move around was a clear priority for respondents as compared with reducing risks to stockperson health.
Several notable issues emerged during discussions in the focus groups which affected how we interpret these results and highlight the need for further in-depth research to understand how members of the Australian community draw on both knowledge and values to interpret information and make decisions about animal welfare. First, research participants tended to express their values differently when stating abstract preferences as compared with how they described their values when presented with concrete trade-off situations. In particular, research participants tended to prefer improving hens’ affective states as an outcome in trade-off situations, while this was not prioritised in exercises that ranked preferences or when respondents were asked directly about affective states. Focus group discussions indicated that participants empathised with the hens’ situations in more concrete situations but found it difficult to imagine a hen having abstract mental and emotional needs and experiences. This finding indicates that there may be a tension between how members of the Australian community think and reason about animal welfare and their ‘gut feeling’ when making value judgements related to animal welfare. It also suggests that care needs to be taken when designing research tools in order to be able to explore both of these aspects of participants’ reasoning.
Second, research participants tended to have different understandings of key terms related to animal welfare in comparison to how they are typically used in animal welfare science. Terms such as ‘choice,’ ‘light,’ and ‘space,’ which may be understood by animal scientists and those in the egg industry as objective and measurable, tended to be value-based for study respondents. Focus group discussions revealed that participants had different understandings of key terms in comparison to how they are typically used in animal welfare science which in turn had important implications for our interpretations of values and preferences in the community survey. These findings suggest that such terms have considerable impact when used both in research or other communications with members of the Australian community and have considerable potential to result in miscommunication and misunderstandings as a result.
Focus group participants differed in their willingness to accept any compromises to what they viewed as best animal welfare practices in order to make the Australian egg industry sustainable. Most focus group respondents did accept that some compromises were likely to be necessary. For example, if farmers did not have adequate outdoor space or were unable to prevent the risk of hens contracting diseases from local wildlife, ‘proper treatment’ in indoor systems was often viewed as ‘the next best thing’ by focus group participants. However, a minority of participants questioned why egg production should take place at all if farmers were unable to guarantee safe outdoor access and, by extension, to provide what the participants believed to be the only conditions under which the farmers could ensure adequate welfare for their hens. Overall, participants’ willingness to accept compromises to animal care that would still allow a good standard of welfare and make the egg industry more sustainable depended on the perceived intent of egg farmers. Focus group participants showed little acceptance of compromises to animal welfare which they perceived to be income maximising, such as having more hens in a particular sized space which was legal but more than usual. They were sceptical that farmers would improve animal welfare without community pressure (despite their unwillingness to participate in such activities beyond making purchasing decisions) and tended to believe that farmers were primarily profit motivated. As a result, they emphasised the need to make and enforce layer hen welfare standards and to strictly monitor labelling schemes to ensure accountability. Focus group participants accepted that the demand for high-welfare eggs (and implicitly their sale at a higher price point) would compensate for stricter welfare standards and increased oversight, and therefore expressed limited sympathy for farmers who were unable to meet those higher welfare criteria.
The meanings of terms such as ‘choice,’ ‘light,’ and ‘space,’ which may be understood by animal scientists and those in the egg industry as objective and measurable, tended to be value-based among respondents. For example, participants felt that hens ought to have access to what they described as ‘proper’ sunlight, which was often associated with the experience of freedom and contrasted with being ‘cooped up’ or ‘stuck indoors’ even if natural light was provided. Participants characterised spending time in sunlight as a basic right for living beings and its absence as a deprivation. Similarly, the term ‘space’ was used to refer to an abstract need which was also associated with freedom and openness, rather than a defined and measurable area. Spaces in cages or barns were perceived as inherently ‘worse’ or ‘less than’ outdoor spaces, and farmers were believed not to care about animal welfare if they ‘maximise the number of animals in the space’ even if the space was strictly speaking within regulatory or agreed best practice standards.
Additionally, participants often conflated the terms ‘cage’ and ‘barn’ to mean any type of enclosure. This confusion was in part due to a lack of knowledge about current Australian egg production standards, but also served to escalate or diffuse the moral weight of certain trade-off options. For example, one respondent described barns as “still a cage,” while another considered cages that house multiple birds as being “pretty close to free-range, because even though they’re free-range they’re still within an enclosed environment.” These types of comments suggest that the meanings or understandings associated with these terms for members of the Australian community are not based in literal or formal definitions, but rather on their underlying values relating to animal welfare, and in particular their negative responses to ‘cages’ and positive responses to outdoor or ‘free-range’ living.
While we were conscious in designing the survey to avoid making explicit references to different types of production systems, the terms ‘light,’ ‘sun-bathing,’ and ‘space’ were used in questions that aimed to identify community values and preferences. For example, one option in a trade-off scenario involved providing “space for hens to relax without interruption.” Our focus group discussions suggest that the term ‘space’ may have carried greater weight in the scenario than we had intended based on its literal interpretation. In other words, our focus groups revealed that what hens have space to do may be less important to members of the Australian community than the fact that they have the space to do it, namely whatever it is that they wish to do. This finding suggests that such terms may have considerable impact when used in social science research or other communications with members of the Australian community and have considerable potential to result in miscommunication and misunderstandings as a result.
IV. DISCUSSION
Both our quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that a multi-pronged approach is necessary in order to meet diverse community expectations for layer hen welfare in commercial egg production in Australia. In addition to prioritising different layer hen welfare goals, findings from the qualitative focus group discussions indicate that even shared priorities draw on a range of values related to layer hens’ needs and farmers’ intentions, as well as different understandings of key terms.
Several findings from this study suggest a need to put in place processes that will allow building of the community’s capabilities to take on board new information, so that they can use such information to more clearly articulate and advocate for their values related to layer hen welfare, human health, and environmental outcomes of commercial egg production. Simply providing more information is not a solution, as we have shown that information provision alone does not result in engagement with the new information, in parallel to the extensive literature available from the field of public understanding of science on the ‘deficit model’ (Sturgis and Allum, 2004; Simis et al., 2016).
In addition, value-based understandings of key terms impact how this information is interpreted and may lead to miscommunication and misunderstandings. These findings highlight the need for further research on how scientific or industry concepts are interpreted by members of the community and how these interpretations may be shaped by different forms of media or a ‘vocal few’ who are active in public discourse, just to note a few examples. Community members’ tendencies to maintain their initial value-judgements in light of new knowledge and avoid engaging with complex issues suggest that there is a need to identify learning systems or processes that are sensitive to different value frameworks and stakeholder interests. The focus group discussions that were conducted as part of this research provide some hints as to how deliberative or dialogical approaches can help participants to begin to embed new information within their current knowledge and value frameworks and introduce them to novel perspectives that may challenge those frameworks.
Further exploration is required about how general values associated with particular moral outlooks play out in the domain of animal welfare particularly in relation to understandings of the role of the farmer and his or her moral duties within a commercial production system. The need for such research is underscored by the generally negative perceptions among research participants that commercial egg producers do not care about the welfare of their layer hens, as well as the finding that farmer or stockperson health is considered to be less of a priority than is production animal welfare. These findings raise the question as to how such negative perceptions impact opportunities to improve layer hen welfare.
Finally, in light of industry efforts to improve the sustainability of commercial egg production, a key finding of this research is that members of the Australian public tend to prioritise animal welfare ahead of environmental outcomes. This preference seems to be rooted in the perception that egg production already has a relatively low impact on the environment as well as tendencies among research participants to conflate environmental sustainability with hens’ ‘natural’ living environments. A priority for future research may be to investigate how community members’ perceptions of environmental sustainability and animal welfare are linked, and in particular how they would view more technological approaches to sustainability compared to visions of the ‘old fashioned’ farmer doing ‘the right thing.’ Thus this study provides important data for future policy and practice decisions both by producers and at an industry-wide level, and has implications not only for the egg industry, but for animal-based production and research about it more generally.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: We wish to acknowledge statistical analysis support from Dr Jesmin Ara Rupa and Dr Raymond Tobler; Rebekah Harms for assistance with data collection; and Mr Jarrod Lange for preparing the map of participants’ locations. Recruitment of focus group participants was conducted by Qualitative Recruitment Australia Pty Ltd. Survey recruitment and survey hosting was carried for the McNair yellowSquares. The study has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Adelaide (approval number H-2019-188). Australian Eggs Limited provided the funds to support this project.
       
Presented at the 32th Annual Australian Poultry Science Symposium 2021. For information on the next edition, click here.

Ankeny RA & Paxson R (2020) Values in Layer Hen Welfare 2.0: The Application of Community Values to Key Layer Hen Welfare Issues. Report for Australian Eggs Ltd.

Fisher AD, Hemsworth PH, Ankeny RA, Millar Y & Acharya R (2019) Animal Welfare and Values: Final Project Report (for Australian Eggs Ltd).

Lincoln YS & Guba E (1999) Naturalistic Inquiry. Sage.

Moffat K, Murphy S & Boughen N (2018) Australian Egg Industry Community Research 2018 Report. CSIRO.

Moffat K, Murphy S & Boughen N (2019) Australian Egg Industry Community Research Report 2019. CSIRO.

Simis MJ, Madden H, Cacciatore MA & Yeo SK (2016) Public Understanding of Science 25: 400–14.

Sturgis P & Allum N (2004) Public Understanding of Science 13: 55–74.

Waytz A, Cacioppo J & Epley N (2010) Perspectives on Psychological Science 5: 219–32.

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Authors:
Rachel Ankeny
University of Adelaide
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Rebecca Paxton
University of Adelaide
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