Understanding Animal Health

This project ran from 2006-2008 and was funded by the ESRC (project no. RES-000-22-1738). The project website can be found here, and the End of Award report read here.

Background

This project built on an earlier paper that arose out of my PhD concerning the debate over the transmission of bovine tuberculosis that was published in Journal of Rural Studies. The paper focussed on the different ways in which nature was defined by the various interest groups competing to redefine policy.

Since that paper was written various events had occurred - Foot and Mouth disease for one - and policy makers and interest groups began talking more and more about the responsibilities of biosecurity. The purpose of the project was to examine the governance of biosecurity and farmers' understandings and attitudes towards biosecurity in the context of bovine tuberculosis.

Aims and Objectives

The study had three key objectives:

1. to investigate how biosecurity policies are shaped in different regulatory environments (England and Wales) and examine how they affect animal health policies.
2. to consider farmers’ understandings of biosecurity, how they learn about it, and why they accept or resist biosecurity measures by exploring farmers' social and cultural knowledges of animal disease and biosecurity measures.
3. to assess how biosecurity policies are implemented by Local Authorities, the regulatory tactics used and reasons for local variations.

Methodology

The project mostly involved interviewing with some participant observation at farms. Approxiately 60 farmers were interviewed about their views on biosecurity and bovine tuberculosis. Policy officers were interviewed from England and Wales as were members of two key biosecurity partnership groups - the TB husbandry group in England, and the Wales TB Action Group in Wales.

Findings

The main findings can be found in the end of award report. Briefly, the research argued that attempts to communicate biosecurity to farmers ignored their own culturally constructed understandings of disease (in this case bovine tuberculosis). As a result, biosecurity messages reinforced the behaviours that governments were trying to reduce. This finding is similar to those found in studies of public health communication and the study drew on theories of 'candidature' by Charlie Davison et al. The research called for greater use of social research by governments to design better methods of animal health communication.

In relation to the role of partnership, the project found that the concept of partnership had been used differently in England and Wales. Of the two partnerships, biosecurity ended up being defined in different ways according to the relative strengths of each member. In Wales, the research suggested that the partnership had a strong political direction (as is the case in many partnerships) but group members accepted this. Unlike other partnerships though, members didnt walk away from it - rather they felt they had to play along with it to ensure they were in position to influence debate when the right opporunity arose.

Publications

The main publications to arise from this research so far are:

A paper about farmers understandings of biosecurity and animal health:

“The ecological paradox: social and natural consequences of the geographies of animal health promotion”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33 433–446.

A paper about the different versions of agricultural space deployed in arguments for and against biosecurity:

“The spaces of biosecurity: prescribing and negotiating solutions to bovine tuberculosis” Environment and Planning A, 40 1568 – 1582

Other papers are under review

The research was also featured on Farming Today and I was called as witness to the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Parliamentary Select Committee. The findings are drawn upon in their 2008 report on Bovine TB in Cattle and Badgers.

Conference Papers and Seminars

The project led to a number of conference papers and seminars in 2007-2008. You can see all of them on the page for conference papers. The key conference papers were:

“Its luck if you go clear and bad luck if you go down”: Lay Epidemiology, Candidates for Bovine Tuberculosis and the Implications for Biosecurity. Royal Geographical Society annual conference, London, August 2007.

“Biosecurity, “Sound Science” and “Partnership Decision Making”. XXII European Congress for Rural Sociology, Wageningen, Holland, August 2007 [with Alex Franklin].

Farmers’ attitudes to culling and curing badgers from bovine tuberculosis. Animals and Society II Conference, Tasmania, July, 2007.

The Spaces of Biosecurity. Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago, March, 2006.