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For the last ten years, the institutional leaders of agronomical research in France have been encouraging researchers to look into the welfare of farm animals, a concern raised in the name of current social demand. As a matter of fact, this new preoccupation originates with European Union rules which impose a gradual but apparently inescapable alleviation of the constraints presently bearing on farm animals. The social demand argument obfuscates the history of the relationship between the State and science and their respective roles in the degradation of animal living conditions during the process of industrialization of livestock farming.