A research on determining consumer preferences for prospective animal welfare applications in poultry and cattle husbandry

While the efforts to equalize the food demand to food supply increase, with global competition and technological progress, increases in global income per capita causes an increase in consumers' awareness and brought forward issues such as organic agriculture and food ethics. Animal welfare concept can be considered under food ethics and is a developing concept. Animal welfare that can be considered under "merit goods" in economics is important in increasing social welfare bur is not generally demanded. Even though concepts like these are considered to be "more important in developed countries in order to trade with developed countries ethical agricultural production will become more important. In this context the aim of this study can be considered as determining Turkey's position in terms of ensuring animal welfare the study. This study, shows the monetary amount that they are ready to pay for ensuring animal welfare. The animal welfare criteria that is questioned in this study for red meat and egg laying hen production systems are criteria that are accepted by Statistical tools used in this study are non-parametric analyses and discrete choice models that are based on logit regression analyses. According to the survey results 83% of the consumers do not have any knowledge about animal welfare. Also 84,8% of the consumers believe that eggs that are bought directly from farmers have higher animal welfare levels while 90,6% of the consumers believe that red meat bought from butchers have higher animal welfare levels compared to packaged products sold in shops. According to the research results consumers willingness to pay for some of the attributes used in the study have been determined. In the case of egg laying chickens consumers' willingnes to pay for increasing the animals' access to feed areas has been determied to be 0,159 TL/30 eggs, willingness to pay for not keeping the animals in closed areas was 0,98 TL/30 eggs olarak belirlenmiştir. Also willingness to pay for keeping animals from unnecesarry physical intervention was 0,841 TL/30 eggs. In cattle hısbandry willingness to pay for animal welfare applications has been determined to be too low for analysis and has not been determined.