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Ethics-Sociology-Philosophy

Le lycée permet-il aux jeunes de comprendre l’élevage ? État des lieux et propositions

By January 12, 2021February 2nd, 2021No Comments

Document type : Scientific article published in INRAE Productions animales

Authors: Alizée Chouteau, Catherine Disenhaus, Gilles Brunschwig

Preview: Many members of the French public no longer have any ties to the farming community and/or no close family member who is a farmer. Those who choose to leave urban areas to settle "in the country" sometimes find themselves in conflict with local farmers, as their surroundings do not fit with their concept of the countryside  (an idealised bucolic setting vs. smells, noise and dirty roads...) (Grannec et al., 2013).

Meanwhile, livestock farming has for a number of years been suffering from an increasingly poor image, fuelled by the various scandals that have widely shaken public confidence in the sector and contributed to the development of particular food concerns (Birlouez, 2018) (for example videos shot in farms or slaughterhouses showing images that are shocking to the general public, the scandal of horse meat found in 100% beef lasagna, etc.). To this must be added a shift in attitudes that includes greater sensitivity to animal welfare and the development of an image of the pet as the reference point to assessing relationships with other categories of animal, in particular those that are subject to the professional activity of farming for human consumption (meat, milk, eggs) (Wolff, 2017 Delanoue, 2018a Fostier, 2019).

The general public's knowledge about how the food they eat is produced is very limited, as was demonstrated, for example, in a survey carried out by the ACCEPT project (http://accept.ifip.asso.fr). Of 2,000 French adults, 57% said they had little or no knowledge of how animals are farmed in France (Dockès, 2017). A Europe-wide survey conducted in 2006 showed that, of the 1,007 French citizens questioned, only 12% described themselves as familiar with the conditions in which animals are farmed in France, while 57% knew "a little" (European Commission, 2007). 63% of French respondents said they wanted to be better informed about how animals are currently farmed and in a fresh survey in 2015 this figure rose to 72% (European Commission, 2016).

Secondary school students are the citizens and consumers of the future. For this reason, the way they gain their understanding of how food is obtained, particularly animal products, is an important matter. The work presented here is a synthesis of several approaches aimed to identify how general secondary-school education in France assists students in gaining a better understanding of animal husbandry (Chouteau et al., 2019). The first step was to improve our own knowledge of this public and its expectations of livestock farming. In a second step, we focused on the place occupied by animal husbandry in general secondary education by analysing teachers' experiences, the contents of the school curriculum and the educational resources currently available in textbooks. We chose not to include specialised agricultural education in the study as courses on animal husbandry are naturally more developed here. […]

Farm-animal welfare has become a major public concern over the past five years (Delanoue, 2018a). In the European Union (EU), the views of the public on this subject were assessed in surveys conducted by the European Commission in 2006 and 2015. In 2015, of a thousand French people questioned, 98% thought it was important or very important to protect the welfare of farm animals. And 88% thought that farm animal welfare should be better-protected in France, making it one of the countries with the highest proportion of concerned respondents in the EU (82% on average across all countries) (European Commission, 2016).

In France, according to the survey conducted in 2014, 42% of secondary school students had a negative image of the impacts of livestock farming on animal welfare, with animal welfare being the primary concern for 80% of them (Roguet et al., 2015). In 2018, 63% of respondents thought that animal husbandry was not an animal welfare-friendly activity, with animal welfare remaining the top concern (Chouteau et al., 2018b).

Poultry farming is generally the farming type most criticized by French secondary students, with duck and goose farms leading the way: "ill-treatment for foie gras for example", followed by chicken and turkey farms. Laying hens come next, where criticism is made of the lack of space and the cage system: "Chickens: there are thousands of them in sheds, suffocating each other". Suckler calves and pigs follow, while secondary school students are affected by the idea of the violent slaughter of these animals "killed in a sickening way and sometimes skinned alive". Dairy cows are, according to the students, raised in better conditions, as the farmers would be more likely to take better care of them to enable them to produce milk. Goat and sheep farms still enjoy a fairly positive image with the general public.

From the INRAE Productions Animales website