In my work, I am focused on improving animal welfare through policy and legislation. Specifically, my job involves picking the policy or legislation options that will bring about the biggest improvement in farmed animal welfare. (Here, I use terms like “policy” and “legislation” broadly—these terms usually describe the rules made by governments, but they can also apply to company policies which is especially important in food retailer animal welfare policies.)

This is actually a very peculiar task. My colleagues and I speak with people (MPs, policymakers, civil servants, supermarket procurement officers) to change the text of written documents (parliamentary acts, regulations, corporate policies). We don’t care about the documents themselves. However, the documents happen to cause further changes in on-farm practices (e.g. stocking densities on fish farms, housing conditions for egg-laying hens, the breed of chickens used for meat production). We don’t even care about these on-farm practices per se. But these on-farm practices happen to cause further changes in animals’ physiology and subjective mental state (a fish suffers less, a hen feels less frustrated, a chicken experiences fewer injuries). Changing the text of the written document exerts an influence over animal physiology.

Therefore, you can see the legislation and an animal’s biology as two parts of a larger system—a legislative-physiological system. These systems form the core of my work. Like any system, legislative-physiological systems are governed by constraints. As much as I’d like to change the text of an Act to “All animal agriculture is banned”, this is not politically feasible. My job is to change the text of these documents to influence animal physiology in a way that increases animal welfare as much as possible while working within the political, economic, and social constraints in the country where I happen to be working.

This is similar in principle to the classic “social-ecological systems” framework from environmental studies, which recognises how human society has a very strong influence over ecological processes (Ostrom 2009).

Beyond animal welfare and environmental sustainability, there are other examples of legislative-physiological systems:

  • Vaccination: Yesterday, I received my annual COVID booster vaccine. Because a group of people in Parliament House in Adelaide wrote a document in a certain way, my body now has a different immune system. A written document has changed the very cells in my body.
  • Tattoos: I have previously written about how empires often seek to control tattoo practices due to the way that these tattoo practices interact with culture and religion. This is a very visible example of documents (e.g. proclamations of an emperor; a company’s dress code) influencing people’s physiology (the presence or absence of ink in the dermis).
  • Self-actualisation: When people need to spend all of their energy working just to survive, their mental experience is very different from when people have the leisure to explore their interests and express their identity (further reading). The category into which people fall is largely determined by economic and social conditions, which itself interacts strongly with legislation. Too many people struggle just to put food on the table, even in wealthy countries in Australia. When policies are well-designed, people become wealthier, healthier, and happier and thus have more freedom to explore the meaning of their life. Policies have a very strong influence over people’s mental experiences.
  • Biopolitics: The concept of biopolitics, popularised by Michel Foucault, generalises these ideas. Queer people witnessing the politics of the United States and the United Kingdom in 2025 need no explanation of this concept. From Wikipedia: “In its essence, biopolitics investigates how political power intersects with biological life, shaping the bodies, behaviors, and well-being of populations through diverse strategies and controls.”