Development of an attitude scale towards animal welfare for primary education students

Abstract

Currently, the construct of animal welfare is becoming widespread in society. In this work we have developed and validated a scale of attitudes towards animal welfare which includes aspects such as the abuse of animals for pleasure or ignorance, the use of animals for entertainment, the situations in which farm animals are or the pets abandonment. With this instrument we have measured Primary students’ attitude and we have found results that encourage including some animal welfare contents in Science lessons. Among the major conclusions we can see that when the students get higher courses at school, they become their attitude to animal welfare more unfavourable, and also that the less favorable attitude towards animal welfare always arises in component 2, which deals with leisure with animals.