There are few reliable statistics on the number of hunted animals that are eaten, but the overall consumption of bushmeat in Central Africa is significant and has become a concern in wildlife conservation (Table 1.3). In the case of the slow-reproducing species, the hunting is no longer sustainable and their meat is becoming a delicacy or a treat and fetches high prices (Wilkie and Carpenter, 1999). The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Equatorial Guinea have a particularly high per capita consumption of bushmeat.

Table 1.3. Estimated bushmeat consumption in the Congo Basin in 1998.

Livestock production systems and animal welfare

From an animal welfare perspective it can be helpful to think of livestockfarming as having three production systems:  

● Intensive livestockfarming.

● Industrialized livestockfarming.

● Subsistence livestockfarming.

The causes of animal welfare issues in these sectors are different.

Intensive farming methods involve high levels of input whilst aiming for high levels of output. They are found mainly where there is a limiting resource, such as land or labour, but there is adequate capital to manage the limitation in other ways (e.g. investment in buildings, fencing or mechanization). Intensive livestockfarming is the main supplier of the world’s meat. It is a substantial source of pork, beef, lamb and farmed fish. The animal welfare issues in intensive livestockfarming are the ones that are discussed most in this book, and they are usually connected with trying to make animals conform to particular management systems. They include sow aggression in the pig industry, castration and tail docking in sheep and handling stress in cattle.

In industrialized livestockfarming, the farm is treated as a business whilst applying modern and often innovative manufacturing principles and approaches. Industrialized livestockfarming operates on a large scale. It occurs when a company focuses on a particular commodity and there is usually a high level of control of either the quality or the supply of animals producing that commodity. Often it manages to economize by operating as a vertically integrated business. In the view of the chief executive of one of the largest animal advocacy groups, industrialized pig farming is ‘an abomination’. This comment had more to do with feelings about mass production and anticorporatism than animal welfare, but it could indicate future attitudes towards this agribusiness sector. The animal welfare issues in industrialized livestockfarming are similar to those in intensive farming, but in addition there are problems connected with managing unusually large numbers of animals, such as inspecting grower pigs kept in large groups, handling methods for chicks in hatcheries and individual animal health care in feedlots. In fairness to the intensive livestock sector, the issues that are specific to industrialized production methods can be considered separately.

In subsistence livestockfarming, animals are usually kept as a means for survival rather than profit. Very little of the produce is sold, and inputs other than labour are limited by lack of money. Of the three livestockfarming sectors, subsistence farming occupies the most people, but its productivity is often the lowest because it occurs on marginal land. In some countries, its future is being threatened by population growth. When smallholdings are passed from generation to generation they are often subdivided between the offspring. The size of a subdivided holding reaches a stage where it can no longer sustain livestock, and instead the parcels of land are used for crops and vegetables or for housing. In other countries, however, the shift away from small-scale livestock production is being checked by urbanization of the population, as this is helping to reduce the rate of smallholding subdivision. Elsewhere, a growing number of livestock on small subdivided properties are confined in pens or hutches, or they are tethered, and this is changing some of the priorities in animal welfare. Nevertheless, underfeeding is the predominant animal welfare and production concern in subsistence livestockfarming.