In European animal welfare inspection on farms and at slaughter, inspectors encounter moral challenges that reveal the paradox at the heart of animal welfare. Against the harsh realities of industrial agriculture, not only are their idealized notions of animal wellbeing unrealizable, but inspectors are instrumental in perpetuating standards of welfare that they feel are unsatisfactory and at times inadequate. An ethnographic study across four European countries elaborates on the moral practice of care and the ways that veterinary epistemic regimes have been captured by audit rationalities. By focusing on those who audit, the ostensibly ‘powerful’ actors who are rarely studied in audit literature, I examine the ways that inspectors negotiate farmer, animal and their own welfare through the veterinary‐audit gaze. This encompasses veterinary expertise and regulatory indicators but is not unaffected by farmer interests and the animals whose welfare they are responsible for safeguarding. Burdened with an illusory form of power, inspectors mitigate the alienation of audit by innovating ways to make a difference that counts. Amidst the growing prominence of veterinary knowledges in mediating human‐animal relations, this article advances the emerging field of veterinary anthropology by describing how audit culture erodes the care that animates veterinary expertise.
Eimear Mc Loughlin (Wed,) studied this question.