Well-being and suffering in livestock farming: living conditions at work for people and animals

Starting in the 1980s in France, the scientific problems relating to the well-being of animals reduced a complicated social critique of industrial systems of raising livestock to a matter of adapting animals to the living conditions imposed by these systems. This swept out of view questions about the working conditions for farmers and wage-earners. However people and animals tend to share living conditions in these systems, conditions that cause suffering. Given the intensified pace of work, as people tend an even larger number of animals, and the mounting pressure on both people and livestock, affects are repressed, and communication breaks down. Relations to one’s self and to others are altered, and the relations to death is ‘pathologized’ at the work place – thus providing further evidence of a failed relation to life and to others in animal husbandry.