the (market-able) capacities of the animal itself. These market-based technologies, in contrast to those considered by other papers in this special issue, offer a more diverse take on the form of animaletechnology relations relevant for study; everything from technologies of farm certification procedures, product labelling and branding, biotechnologies for reproducing standardised animal bodies, through to dimmer light switches in animal housing. Crucially, we have shown how this varied sweep of technologies work with and modify the animal to foster, shape and pacify the market-able capacities of the animal in the higher wel- fare food product market. The assemblage of these diverse tech- nologies are impossible to ignore in any attempt to understand the innovation and maintenance of this market, because, as we dem- onstrate, the market is ultimately achieved through these multiple animal-technological fixes and ongoing adaptations, across many sites including the biotechnological reproduction of the animal, its life on a farm, how it is killed, turned into pieces of meat, packaged and marketed.
As we look to the future, animal welfare science is paying far greater attention to the living animal, its preferences, its body, its ‘feelings’ and so on (Roe, 2010) as a contribution to economic value. And yet, marketisation implies an emphasis placed on those wel- fare elements that lend themselves more immediately to calcu- lability, creating an implicit tension with those that do not so lend themselves. The current re-qualification of that calculability e drawing in an extended, adaptable, socio-technical network of new actors e has significant implications for the nature and commu- nication of welfare ‘evidence’ and the manner in which it is artic- ulated within an increasingly market oriented delivery framework.
The focus of attention on these particular, consumer-friendly, aspects of farm animal welfare, risk obfuscating at the consump- tion end, what many welfare scientists and others regard as more pressing welfare issues within animal farming such as, for example, lameness in sheep and dairy herds, tail biting in pigs or, alter- natively, welfare at slaughter.
Finally, we come back to where we started and the debate within welfare science over the relative weight given to input and animal based assessment methods for farm animal welfare. Growing reference to, and advocacy of, system-based labelling schemes such as are used for shell eggs throws the shoe back on the foot of input-based welfare assessment, leaving a questionable place for the new range of output-based measures currently being experimented in a number of different situations. We feel that there is the danger here of a missed opportunity. The recent report from the Farm Animal Welfare Forum (2010) on ‘Labelling Food from Farm Animals’, while promoting the principle of production system labelling, makes the clear point that outcome measures should be introduced “to provide assurance that the welfare potential of the various production systems proposed for labelling is being realised in practice” (2010, p. 18). This, we regard as essential