The taste of happiness: free-range chicken

Happiness is an elusive concept, it brings about ideas of ecstasy, contentment, delight but also health and strength, pouvoir and puissance ... a state of mind and body that is precarious and contingent. How to give form and substance to an idea that is otherwise difficult to conceive? What is happiness for a chicken? What is it like to be a chicken today? Free-range certification offers a powerful interpretation of animals' happiness in the context of farming, and it does so by providing a particular translation of the `natural' in the domesticated environment of farming. But it also offers a specific definition of materiality, in the form of the body of the animal, presented as an expression of her/his quality of life in the juiciness and other organoleptic qualities of her/his flesh or eggs. In this paper, I present the results of an on-farm assessment of the welfare of free-range chickens in the UK, carried out by adopting the Welfare QualityÕ protocol. This is a new evaluation of the on-farm welfare of animals that encompasses many aspects of animals' lives, including animals' negative and positive emotions. It suggests that animals' `happiness' can be measured and can become part of an overall score of welfare, but it also addresses the complexities of the interpretation of the emotional states of animals. I propose that this case contributes to the debate on `material politics' and the invention of animals' happiness can be seen as a political technique that affects human ^ non-human animal relations. doi:10.1068/a43257 (1)While a concern for animals' emotions can be found in Darwin's The Origin of Species, the acknowledgment of the presence and importance of emotions in farm animals is still a contested issue in animal science; for a review of this debate, see Veissier et al (2009). I will argue that this invention is a means of engagement (Marres, 2009) with the life of farm animals, and it might work as a tool for opening up a space for better human ^ nonhuman animal relationships; a space where human ^ nonhuman animal relationships might be enacted differently than in current intensive animal farming (Law and Miele, forthcoming). Here my interest in the role of this `invention' is inspired by the work of Gabriel de Tarde (1903; 1998), who, at the beginning of the last century, emphasized the role of ideas and invention in economic life, anticipating Joseph Schumpeter's theory by many years (Barry and Thrift, 2007; Candea, 2010; Latour and Lëpinay, 2009). However, the work that this invention has set itself to do is difficult: the process of opening up a space for better human ^ nonhuman animal relationships is uncertain because of its ambivalence [the happiness of animals is most often presented as instrumental to the better taste of the meat they will produce (Miele et al, 2005)] and its precariousness (many welfare claims on products are not based on specifically developed animal-friendly standards of production). I propose that these ambiguities are better characterized by looking at the techniques and devices by which the life of farm animals is made visible to a distant public of city dwellers and supermarket shoppers. Then in the paper I explore two main techniques of visibility and their brokering devices. These devices produce what Morgan Meyer has defined as `̀ brokered knowledge'', which is: `̀ knowledge made more robust, more accountable, and more usable; knowledge that `serves locally' at a given time; knowledge that has been deand reassembled'' (2010, page 123). The first one is a technique of the market: that is, how animals' emotions are presented in marketing messages. Here the brokering devices are the welfare claims on labels of animal foods. The second technique draws on animal science, and it deals with developing scientifically validated measures of animals' emotional states. In this latter case, the brokering devices are mainly the evaluation sheets used on farms and the scientific papers that they produce. The two representations of animals' lives generated by these techniques are brought together by a recent intervention of the European Union, which in its Animal Welfare Action Plan 2006 ^ 2010 has indicated the intention to develop (and funded research for) a European Animal Welfare standard (EC, 2006; 2009), based on scientifically validated measures, which could harmonize the way in which welfare claims are made on animal foods (Blokhuis, 2008; Blokhuis et al, 2010). I address these issues through the presentation of a specific case study of animals' emotions: (the invention of) chickens' happiness, how it is presented in marketing messages of free-range chickens, and how it is assessed through scientific measures with the Welfare QualityÕ protocol. The paper unfolds in this way. First, I locate it within the current debates in geography and in science studies on ethical consumption practices. Then I introduce the first technology of visibility, by outlining a recent development in the market for chicken meat and eggs, where many products are characterized by the appearance of claims of animals' happiness through labels and other associated marketing strategies, such as television adverts. This market differentiation has been welcomed by many (for example, see Singer and Mason, 2006) as a new approach to improving animal welfare by means of stimulating consumer demand for animal-friendly products. Subsequently, I address the welfare problems associated with the changes in chicken production in the last forty years, and the rise of intensive and indoor systems of animal farming. The diffusion of intensive systems of production led many animal rights/animal welfare NGOs and animal scientists to voice specific welfare concerns for farm animals living in confined systems all year round, and to suggest the concept of `free range' as a possible solution. The taste of happiness: free-range chicken 2077