Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Animal welfare is a debated topic in modern society. In order to set a minimum standard of animal welfare, Sweden have a governmental legislation and a system of official animal welfare control. Unfortunately, there seems to be a resistance from farmers toward the control, at least if one is to believe what is written in the agricultural media. Therefore, this study examines two well-known agriculture magazines of good repute: ATL and Land Lantbruk. Magazines between 2017-09-01
and 2020-12-31 were studied and texts about animal welfare legislation as well as official animal welfare controls were included. The aim was to analyze if the magazines pictured animal welfare in a neutral, negative or positive way.
The results showed that the magazines only wrote 14 positively charged texts out of the 106 texts that mentioned animal welfare. Most texts had a neutral approach (48/106) to animal welfare, and 44 texts had a negative approach. When animal owners wrote texts in the magazines, they were usually critical to animal welfare. No differences were found between animal species in how animal welfare was portrayed.
The conclusion is that ATL and Land Lantbruk mainly portrayed animal welfare in a neutral or negative way. However, it is not possible to estimate how big of an impact these magazines have on people’s attitudes only by these papers. In the future more studies are needed in order to evaluate the influence of agricultural magazines, and to investigate farmers and pet owner’s attitude toward animal welfare legislation and the official animal welfare control.