Exploring the legitimacy of industry-led farm animal welfare governance using examples of Canadian and United States dairy standards

The governance of farm animal welfare is led, in certain countries and sectors, by industry organisations. The aim of this study was to analyse the legitimacy of industry-led farm animal welfare governance focusing on two examples: the Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Dairy Cattle and the Animal Care module of the proAction programme in Canada, and the Animal Care module of the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) programme in the United States (US). Both are dairy cattle welfare governance programmes led by industry actors who create the standards and audit farms for compliance. We described the normative legitimacy of these systems, based on an input, throughput, and output framework, by performing a document analysis on publicly available information from these organisations' websites and found that the legitimacy of both systems was enhanced by their commitment to science, the presence of accountability systems to enforce standards, and wide participation by dairy farms. The Canadian system featured more balanced representation, and their standard development process uses a consensus-based model, which bolsters legitimacy compared to the US system. However, the US system was more transparent regarding audit outcomes than the Canadian system. Both systems face challenges to their legitimacy due to heavy industry representation and limited transparency as to how public feedback is addressed in the standards. These Canadian and US dairy industry standards illustrate strengths and weakness of industry-led farm animal welfare governance.