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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research with veterinary inspectors tasked with safeguarding animal welfare in the Dutch meat industry, I analyze how inspection reshapes 'business-as-usual' while gaining its value relative to negative imaginaries without regulation.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I explore relations with ‘business-as-usual’ that emerged in my ethnographic research with veterinary inspectors who safeguard animal welfare in the Dutch meat industry.

Veterinary inspectors enforce animal welfare law intended to prevent ‘unnecessary suffering’ (see McLoughlin 2025), a legal term that highlights the moral duty to limit suffering while accepting the practical reality that some suffering is unavoidable. In veterinary inspection, it matters not that animals are killed and reared, but how they are killed and reared—whether animals are stuck, sick, or conscious after stunning.

Due to their local and specific engagements, veterinary inspectors are often criticized for ‘stabilizing business-as-usual.’ I complicate this critique with two ways veterinary inspectors make sense of their work.

First, inspectors emphasize that the definition of ‘unnecessary suffering’ has historically changed in response to societal concerns, technological innovation, and ethological research. Inspectors are tasked with guiding the realization of welfare law in practice, safeguarding previously unregulated aspects of animal welfare. Inspection thus emerges not as stabilizing the status quo but steering its adjustment to new notions of welfare.

Second, with memories of less-regulated pasts, inspectors emphasize how (as one participant put it) ‘animal welfare would be far worse without inspection.' Here, the ‘otherwise’ against which inspection gains value is one in which economic incentives go unchecked, leading to greater suffering.

I argue that in analyses of human–livestock relations, it matters what degree of stability we ascribe to business-as-usual and what alternative futures are latent in our evaluations of the present.