Putting the chicken before the egg : the potential for the Australian consumer law to advance food animal welfare initiatives
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2012
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Bruce, Alexander Donald Paul
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This thesis explores whether and to what extent the theoretical and legal foundations of competition and consumer law can advance food animal welfare initiatives and address welfare issues associated with the religious slaughter of animals. By 'food animals' I mean the millions of chickens, cows and pigs processed and slaughtered in Australia each day for human consumption.
This exploration proceeds, as an example, through an evaluation of the prohibition against misleading or deceptive conduct in section 18 of the new Australian Consumer Law ('the ACL').{u2091}
Since mid-2011, the welfare of food animals has assumed a level of urgency in Australia. Disturbing evidence of Australian export cattle being abused by Indonesian abattoir workers as the cattle were slaughtered according to Islamic ritual ignited a national outcry, resulting in the Commonwealth government suspending the entire live export trade for a period of time. Similar abuses were filmed at two Australian abattoirs in 2012.
Although the question posed by this thesis is narrow in its focus, the answers it anticipates, and that are explored throughout, have much wider significance for the universal task of improving the welfare of animals generally and food animals particularly. This is because in answering the central question, the thesis interrogates the normative assumptions, both philosophical and religious, that for millennia have informed the Western characterisation of animals as exploitable property.
It explores the most promising contemporary philosophical challenges to this characterisation, discusses their limitations and identifies theoretical gaps that might be exploited by future scholarship for the benefit of animals.
The thesis questions the protection of freedom of religious practice in democratic societies when those practices involve the slaughter of other sentient beings. It explores the difficulties experienced by governments in increasingly multicultural United Kingdom, European Union and New Zealand, in navigating this highly controversial issue.
With neo-classical economic principles driving contemporary Western markets, the thesis demonstrates the incoherency experienced by governments as they pursue regulatory agendas that bring into conflict the efficient and profitable development of primary industries on the one hand and the welfare of food animals on the other.
However, if an underlying cause of food animal suffering lies in market dynamics informed by neo-classical principles of efficiency and profit{u00AD} maximisation, then perhaps one indirect solution may also emerge from those same principles. Accordingly, the thesis investigates the theoretical and legal potential for consumer protection and competition policy to empower consumers in ways that will advance food animal welfare. And, it evaluates the outer limits of consumer protection jurisprudence, in the form of the prohibition against misleading or deceptive conduct in ACL s 18 in doing so.
In fact, this is precisely the intention of the Commonwealth government. In its 2011 Labelling Logic Report^2 into national food labelling, the Commonwealth government has stated its intention to indirectly regulate these food animal welfare issues through market forces underpinned by competition and consumer policy.
Food animal welfare concerns and religious slaughter practices are characterised by the Labelling Logic Report as 'consumer values issues' best regulated by preventing suppliers from making misleading or deceptive claims, such as 'free range', in marketing their food animal products.^3
In an increasingly competitive food product market, it is anticipated that demand for ethically produced food animal products will signal producers of consumer preferences for food animal welfare practices. In safeguarding this consumer demand, the Commonwealth government intends the ACL to play a key role in preventing suppliers from exploiting consumer demand for welfare-friendly food animal products by preventing misleading or deceptive marketing claims.
Through the analytical device of hypothetical litigation commenced by the ACCC against a large national retailer of food animal products alleging misleading or deceptive conduct in food animal welfare representations associated with those products, the thesis demonstrates how case law enables the ACL to prevent 'positive' but misleading claims. However, it also explores legal difficulties associated with conceptualising silence as misleading or deceptive conduct potentially compromising the ability of the ACL to address welfare issues associated with the religious slaughter of animals.
In these circumstances, if it is seriously intending to support consumer values issues associated with food animal welfare, the Commonwealth government will need to supplement the general provisions of the ACL with more specific legislative reforms empowering consumers to make accurate and informed purchasing decisions in expressing their demonstrated concern for food animal welfare.
Of course, reliance upon the ACL or labelling specific consumer legislation does not absolve Western societies of the larger imperative to develop a coherent philosophy of animal welfare that commands general acceptance. With that imperative in mind, and although this is a legal and not a philosophical thesis it nevertheless proposes a re-definition of the social contract to include all sentient beings based on an 'ethic of bioinclusiveness'; a philosophical framework created by this thesis in describing a new animal welfare ethic grounded in sentience and the fundamental interdependence of human, animals and the environment.
However, until an adequate philosophy of animal welfare has been created and gen.erally accepted, the thesis concludes that consumer demand, protected by the ACL and underwritten by strategic enforcement through the ACCC, has the potential to permit at least partial advances in food animal welfare.
1 Effective from 1January 2011and found in Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth). Section 18 relevantly prohibits a person, in trade or commerce, engaging in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or likely to mislead or deceive.
2 Food Labelling Law and Policy Review Panel, Labelling Logic: Review of Food Labelling Law and Policy, 27 January 2011, Commonwealth of Australia. 3 Ibid 97 [6.3].
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