On (not) seeing the chicken: Perdue, animal welfare, and the failure of transparency

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we analyze Perdue’s animal welfare campaign from 2016 to 2020 to isolate how demands for transparency are mediated and subverted by Perdue’s public facing rhetoric. Though Perdue’s annual releases and commitments to change nominally constitute a victory for animal welfare advocates, the company’s campaign enacts transparency as a sort of publicity for the company that belies marginal gains for the lives of chickens and may ultimately result in increased meat consumption. In providing trackable metrics, offering paternalistic justifications for their treatments of chickens, and through strategic omissions of language and visuals, Perdue satisfies demands for transparency without committing the company to meaningful changes. In that way, transparency-publicity becomes a performative end that allows the company to continue its behavior and give consumers cover for increased meat consumption. We conclude with the implications of this co-optation.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal rights
• rhetoric
• activism
• paternalism
• food justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There is not a monolithic “animal welfare movement,” but for the sake of parsimony we will use the term to refer to the constellation of groups seeking improved treatment of nonhuman animals. A litany of scholars (e. g. Broad, 2016; Ko, 2020; Muller, 2017) highlight deep, seemingly intractable divisions between the myriad groups committed to the cause of nonhuman animal treatment, perhaps the clearest division being between advocates like Temple Grandin who call for humane treatment of nonhuman animals in the pursuit of their exploitation (an example being humane, small scale slaughter of animals who were well cared for) versus rights-based approaches which extend ethical or legal protection to nonhuman animals (thereby precluding their exploitation, in essence vegan abolition).

2. Bringing together rhetorical fragments for analysis is in line with McGee’s (1990) work on text and fragmentation, as “our first job as professional consumers of discourse is inventing a text suitable for criticism” (p. 288). Following their compilation, a textual analysis was conducted to locate themes and interactions with transparency as an organizing term (see Brummett, 2018, for more detail).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Calvin Richard Coker

Calvin Richard Coker (PhD, University of Missouri, 2018) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Louisville, Louisville KY.

Rachael Ane Coker

Rachael Ane Coker (BA, University of Kansas, 2019) is a vegan activist and MA student in the Kent School of Social Work at the University of Louisville, Louisville KY.