Care farms, social work and animals: A cautionary tale

The term ‘care farm’ refers to place-based therapeutic care practices that take place on farms, including those involved in the meat and dairy industries. In Australia, where the care farming movement is in its infancy, this underdevelopment is represented as a missed opportunity. Carol Bacchi’s (2009) framework for critical policy analysis is adopted to consider whose interests are ignored in this humancentric assessment. A Critical animal studies lens is adopted to consider how farmed animals are positioned in care farming ventures. This animal rights perspective corrects the anthropocentric blind spot, which legitimises the capitalist extraction of therapeutic usefulness from the foreshortened and confined lives of farmed animals, further exploiting their bodies and labour, to deliver marketized cross-species relationships of care. It is argued that to live up to their title, care farms should be vegan and equally attentive to the well-being and flourishing of non-human and human care farming participants