It’s interesting that this article was from 2015, so it preceded all the broiler welfare campaigns that are happening now. I think it’s good for animal activists to learn from successes and failures of those who tried to achieve similar goals before us, like the one in the linked article.
Speaking of which, this paper called Market barriers for welfare product innovations describes some other previous efforts to improve chicken welfare in the Netherlands that also failed in interesting ways. Here is one interesting excerpt:
Consumers may find it difficult to interpret welfare attributes. Animal welfare is a so-called credence attribute, i.e., it cannot be verified by the consumer—not even after consumption. Consumers will use certain cues (such as labels and package) and associations (Keller, 1993). Such associations may not always be correct: wrong links could be activated in the consumer’s mind, and incorrect information could become associated with a product. An example of this is the failure of the introduction of slow-growing chicken meat in the Netherlands in the 1980s: consumers were not aware that regular chickens only live 42 days, and thought the 56-day grown chickens were slaughtered too young.
Finally, product image may inhibit the growth of welfare initiatives. The Dutch word for barn eggs, ‘scharrel’ eggs, may evoke an idyllic image of happy animals that live in small couples with a cock and roam around freely on the farmyard pecking about a bit (as suggested by Van Leeuwen, 2005). This perception is actually incorrect as hens are kept indoors. Yet, there is little knowledge amongst Dutch consumers about welfare labels on eggs (Burrel & Vrieze, 2003). Whereas 40% of the Dutch consumers state that they buy outdoor eggs (Anon., 2005c), the actual market share of outdoor systems is less than 4% (Anon., 2005a).
Consider the situation in Germany, where barn eggs are called ‘Bodenhaltung’ eggs (literally translated: floor-produced eggs) and free-range eggs are called ‘Freiland’ eggs (literally translated: freeland, ‘open-air’ eggs). One could argue that the positive and better fitting associations of the Freiland eggs in Germany translated into a better market share: 18.0% in 1999, compared with 2.5% for the free-range outdoor eggs in the Netherlands (Tacken & Van Horne, 2002). This illustrates the potentially powerful role of a positive and fitting image.
(sorry, this is a bit off topic. I wanted to share this stuff anyway but didn’t think it deserved its own post and thought that posting it here would be better than nothing as it might reach the same kind of people I wanted to reach).
It’s interesting that this article was from 2015, so it preceded all the broiler welfare campaigns that are happening now. I think it’s good for animal activists to learn from successes and failures of those who tried to achieve similar goals before us, like the one in the linked article.
Speaking of which, this paper called Market barriers for welfare product innovations describes some other previous efforts to improve chicken welfare in the Netherlands that also failed in interesting ways. Here is one interesting excerpt:
(sorry, this is a bit off topic. I wanted to share this stuff anyway but didn’t think it deserved its own post and thought that posting it here would be better than nothing as it might reach the same kind of people I wanted to reach).