Many consumers express concerns about the welfare of animals in agriculture, but often refrain from purchasing animal‐friendly alternatives that address their concerns. To support consumers in making choices in line with their values and attitudes, this study approaches consumer animal‐friendly product choice as a dilemma between maximising the buyer’s self‐interest and maximising societal interest. To address this social dilemma, we developed and tested positioning strategies that reinforce the animal welfare label with complementary consumption values (functional, emotional, social and epistemic). The results from a choice experiment with Dutch chicken meat shoppers showed that two strategies ‐ emotional and epistemic ‐ effectively increase consumer value perceptions. These insights imply that animal‐friendly products positioned to invoke emotion or curiosity drive consumers towards animal‐friendly product choices, and that these strategies are most effective for consumers who base their choice solely on maximising either self‐interest or societal interest
Presented at 7th International Conference on the Assessment of Animal Welfare at farm group level
The broad field of environmental ethics, animal welfare, animal liberation, and animal rights literature indicate that all encounters between humans and animals are ethically charged. In this article, I shall examine how environmental ethics or animal welfare/rights/liberation literature translate into public media. The case study will delve into the representation of animals in the Dutch newspapers, using content analysis to provide an empirical basis for monitoring public opinion. Assuming that attitudes to animals are influenced by media coverage, the results of this case study will be brought to bear upon the discussion of the representation of animals beyond a specific national context. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
The growing awareness of consumers of the increasing problem with livestock and meat production due to the high nitrogen emissions and the related impact on climate change drives consumption of plant based vegetarian alternatives. Similarly there is also an increasing demand for animal-free, eco-friendly alternative vegan leather. Consequently there has been significant interest in developing leather-like vegan materials from multiple plant sources, such as mango, pineapple and mushroom based materials. However, the commercialization and the growth of sustainable vegan leather production is hampered significantly by the difficulty of achieving the needed quality for the various consumer products as well as the high prices of the vegan alternatives. In the Growing Leather project two SMEs, BioscienZ and B4Plastics, will combine forces with Avans University of Applied Sciences to develop vegan leather from the mushroom based material called mycelium. BioScienZ is a biotech company with strong expertise and capacity to produce low-cost and consistent quality mycelium. B4Plastics is a material development company, with strengths in designing and distributing eco-plastic products. In this project Avans University will use several mycelium types (produced by BioscienZ), and with the guidance of B4Plastics, it will test various additives under many different conditions, to ultimately develop an environmentally friendly, vegan material that will have comparable material characteristics to animal leather and is competitive in price.
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