ABSTRACT
The welfare of agricultural animals is determined not just by their immediate environment, but also by the structures, institutions and economics of agriculture that the farm operates within. That is, animals are subject to layers of control exerted by a complex web of human relationships, attachments and attitudes. And this relational environment operates largely outside the realm of empirical data and overt rationality. It is instead governed by the processes of human social subjectivity. Social subjectivity encompasses the way in which our attachments to individuals and groups are governed by processes such as intuition, unconditioned and conditioned emotion, and implicit learning, which underlies assessments of authenticity and trust.
