Humans and livestock animals at work: toward a multidisciplinary approach of relational practices

Abstract

The legal status of the animal defined as a "sentient being" involves taking into account both the breeder's and animals' points of view for considering work in livestock productions and the human-animal relationship. Farmers' work efficiency, quality of life and animal welfare are targeted. This review paper focuses on a multidisciplinary approach, in particular between the social sciences and ethology in order to understand and improve husbandry practices critically affecting the human-animal relationship. On the one hand, a working time analysis focused on the human-animal contact, reveals a strong diversity among production systems and farms. The diversity in breeders' profiles, attitudes towards animals and their work with animals and in their husbandry strategies are reported. On the other hand, ethology elaborates a conceptual framework based on the fact that farmers and animals build their relationship from the repeated interactions they display. This relationship allows them to predict the issue of the future interactions. Observing the animal's responses to the human represents a synthetic evaluation tool for evaluating their relationship. Ethological studies showed that humans integrate the relational world of animals. This paper points out the interest of describing and evaluating the existing farmers' relational practices towards animals, and developing new and beneficial ones both for farmers and animals.