Last week Colette Vogeler held the first talk in this semester’s “Brown Bag Seminar” – an event hosted by the political science department of the University of Kaiserslautern. Colette Vogeler began her talk on “Animal welfare policy in policy analysis” with an overview of the current state of research in this under-researched policy field. After a brief description of subdivisions of animal welfare, Colette Vogeler spoke about the problems of animal welfare policy.
In fact, there are various competing interests, e.g. between economy and animal welfare, but also sometimes between environmental protection and animal welfare. In the further course of the presentation, different aims of animal protection were mentioned, e.g. the “Five Freedoms” approach, which originated in the UK, the country with the highest level of animal welfare policy in the EU.
Furthermore, Colette presented evidence on the influence of party politics on animal welfare policy in Germany. Yet, there is not only a great variance in animal welfare policy between the German states, but within the EU as well. Indeed, the different national societies exhibit quite different views on the question of who should take care of animal welfare (see figure 1).
In the near future, Colette aims to take a closer look not only at partisan effects but also at other influencing factors such as societal pressures, international dependencies, the influence of interest groups and issues of harmonization in the EU. She also plans to apply her research to the United States and even developing countries.
It was great to see so many students and faculty members at the first Brown Bag Talk in this semester, which turned out to be the most visited one in the history of the Brown Bag Seminar(!). [For more information on the research projects of the Professorship for Policy-Analysis and Political Economy, also visit Alexander von Kulessa’s Brown Bag Talk on “Social Housing – The Politics of Social Housing in Paris, London and New York” on the 12th of December (57-315; 12pm).]
Daniel Meyer
(Photo by Daniel Meyer, figure by Colette Vogeler)