Hästrelaterad medias framställning av det svenska djurskyddet

Abstract: Animal welfare and protecting animals from poor welfare, through means such as legislation and policies, is important in modern society. In Sweden there is a freedom of press regulation, which allows documents handled by authorities to be accessed by citizens. Since cases concerning the animal welfare legislation are handled by the County Administrative Boards, those documents are accessible as well, and the information in the documents are furthermore allowed to be published in media. Agriculture media has earlier been seen to portray Swedish animal welfare in a quite negative way, which might affect farmers’ perception of the legislation and the authorities related to animal welfare inspections. But how is animal welfare portrayed in horse media? This study has examined three popular horse related magazines: Ridsport, Travronden Sport and Hippson. Texts that brought up information or opinions concerning different aspects of the Swedish animal welfare legislation were included. Data was collected through the magazines digital archives, and the analysis was performed on texts published between 2020-03-01 and 2023-03-01. The aim was to determine if the magazines portray animal welfare in a neutral, positive of negative way. Furthermore, this study investigated whether there is a difference between trotting-sport related magazines’ and equestrian magazines’ portrayal of animal welfare. There was also an analysis performed to show whether professional horse husbandry compared with hobby horse husbandry is portrayed equally concerning consequences due to animal welfare legislation. The results showed that the horse related magazines mainly portrayed the Swedish animal welfare in a neutral way (51 neutral texts out of total 66). Travronden Sport which mainly focuses on trotting-sport, published negative texts more often compared to the other magazines, with 25.5% of published texts related to animal welfare legislation containing a negative portrayal compared to Ridsport’s 13%. No significant difference was recorded regarding frequency of texts mentioning professional horse husbandry and hobby horse husbandry affected by animal welfare legislation. The conclusion was that Swedish animal welfare was mainly portrayed in a neutral way in Travronden Sport, Ridsport and Hippson. Negative portrayals were more common than positive portrayals, and negative portrayals occurred more often in Travronden Sport compared to the other magazines. The performed study has limitations, and it cannot be applied on other horse related media than the three that has been used for collections of data. Further studies on the subject is needed to investigate how horse related media affects the horse owners’ attitude and perception of Swedish animal welfare, and furthermore, if there is a difference in other media platforms that the magazines publish information on.