Legal Repair: Domesticating European Legislation on Pig Welfare

Abstract

Our daily activities rely on a proliferating number of things that are subject to decay. As stressed in a growing body of literature, repair is critical to the smooth functioning of material infrastructure. However, this scholarship has overlooked a crucial dimension: things become fragile not only due to material degradation but also as a result of regulatory change. This article introduces the notion of “legal repair” to describe how, in the face of legal change, certain actors reassemble the material world. We elaborate on this concept through an analysis of the domestication of European Union (EU) animal welfare legislation by the French pig sector. While it was feared that stricter pig housing standards would fragilize the existing farms, pig farmers complied using technical systems that failed to significantly improve animal welfare. We analyze this domestication of EU legislation as a process of legal repair. Alongside the political work of the leaders of the pig sector, agricultural advisers also played a key role. Their work reveals the relational nature of legal repair: in the production of “local specifications” matching the demands of existing farming systems, in the negotiation of the finer points of the legislation, and in the redefinition of farming performance.