The politicization of animal welfare: trust and polarization in the animal welfare debate

People care more and more that the food they eat should not harm the climate, their health or the welfare of animals. Food has become a central means of action in one's everyday life. If the current way of producing food starts to diverge from what people perceive as ethically legitimate, food production will have a problem. Today's development in the debate about animal welfare can be described as politicization. Interest and focus on animal welfare have increased significantly both within research, in the media, and among market actors in the food industry, resulting in the number of players in the field rising accordingly. Politicization is characterized by increased polarization and weakened loyalty and trust in those traditionally responsible in an area. For today's food production, this could be a real challenge for the upkeep and design of future food production. Historically speaking, Norway is one of the European countries where people have the highest level of trust in their food and responsible meat production. Previous animal health scandals have affected people's trust here, but never to the same extent as seen in other European countries. While we can see a decline in meat consumption in some European countries, e.g. Germany, the debate around climate and animal welfare has not resulted in significant changes in consumption in Norway. Recent years have only shown a slight decline. Nevertheless, the debate on animal welfare has sharpened and is now central in the public discussion on food. Because of this, one could expect more considerable changes in consumption also here. Although, the lack of changes in actual consumption makes it interesting to investigate whether people do not seem to respond to the public debate or whether their response can be traced elsewhere. This paper sets out to see whether the increased attention to animal welfare rather reflects in changes in trust, supporting the theory of politicization. The analyses in this article are based on Norwegian survey data from 1997, 2000, 2004, 2007 and 2020 to see the development of trust over time. The analyses show that the development was not in either a unilaterally positive or negative direction in 1997-2007. As other studies have shown, trust goes in waves. Animal health scandals, in particular, have caused a "drop" in trust for periods, but it always increases again. However, the analyses show a relatively significant change in a negative direction in the proportion who have complete confidence in good animal welfare in 2020 compared to 2007. Time is not a reason for trust to change in one direction, and therefore it is interesting that it was so much higher in 2007 than in 2020. People seem to have become more uncertain. Yet, is this a wave or a shift? As we previously could point to one reason for a drop in trust, this drop does not have one known incident to explain it, suggesting a more general interest and focus on animal welfare - and doubt.