Welfare

Attention to the welfare of sheep varies across the world. Moreover, human interpretation is somewhat fluid and amorphous on what constitutes animal welfare - and therefore what constitutes good animal welfare. Overall, the concept of animal welfare seems to have the embedded interpretation that the item is how people treat animals during process of making use of them. And the use of animals emanates from people having ownership of them. 

Confining seeing animal welfare to be being the matter of how well humans treat animals in the process of using animals, and whom are their possessions, limits standards of animal welfare from being raised to a higher level. It also stops animal welfare from being interpreted fundamentally differently.  

The core alteration to what is meant by animal welfare would come if humans no longer regarded non-human animals as their inferiors. People would stop being speciesist. So, in the instance of sheep, humans - and not just sheep farmers and those in the wider sheep farming community, but everyone - would then attend to sheep’s welfare as well and equivalently as their own.

A nation which sees itself as a leader in animal welfare is the UK. Giving indication of what sheep welfare currently consists in the UK are the RSPCA welfare standards Sheep and the Code of Recommendations for the Welfare of Livestock: Sheep from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), each dated August 2023. 

Sheep need to be seen fully and accurately, and sheep welfare needs much improvement as a consequence. 

In their sheep welfare attitudes, humans need to display an understanding that sheep are sentient.