Happiness is an elusive concept, it brings about ideas of ecstasy, contentment, delight but
also health and strength, pouvoir and puissance … a state of
mind and body that is precarious and contingent. How to give form and substance to an idea
that is otherwise difficult to conceive? What is happiness for a chicken? What is it like to
be a chicken today? Free-range certification offers a powerful interpretation of animals'
happiness in the context of farming, and it does so by providing a particular translation of
the ‘natural’ in the domesticated environment of farming. But it also offers a specific
definition of materiality, in the form of the body of the animal, presented as an expression
of her/his quality of life in the juiciness and other organoleptic qualities of her/his flesh
or eggs. In this paper, I present the results of an on-farm assessment of the welfare of
free-range chickens in the UK, carried out by adopting the Welfare Quality® protocol. This is
a new evaluation of the on-farm welfare of animals that encompasses many aspects of animals'
lives, including animals' negative and positive emotions. It suggests that animals'
‘happiness' can be measured and can become part of an overall score of welfare, but it also
addresses the complexities of the interpretation of the emotional states of animals. I propose
that this case contributes to the debate on ‘material politics' and the invention of animals’
happiness can be seen as a political technique that affects human–non-human animal
relations.
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