A new industry organisation – the Ethical Pet Industry Confederation – has been launched in the UK to help businesses safeguard the future of animal welfare while still delivering healthy profits.
EPIC, launched by Philippa Robinson, is aimed at developing commercial practices that are first and foremost built on high animal welfare standards and strong ethics.
Philippa has been involved in family businesses and retailing since the age of 19. Her work as a business advisor and management consultant began in 1991, and since then she has guided and supported clients, from small start-ups to international conglomerates on building better businesses and leadership programmes. More recently she worked for the government’s Business Link network and brings the world class business diagnostic skills learnt there to EPIC.
She feels strongly that the world of commerce can, and will, make a lasting positive difference to animal welfare, and she is designing processes and tools to demonstrate that to be the case.
It has been a busy few week for Philippa but she found the time to explain to Pet Trade Xtra why she has launched EPIC.
When was the Ethical Pet Industry Confederation launched?
We launched the website at the beginning of April and for the first three months we will be actively engaging with animal welfare organisations, business ethics experts and the pet industry itself, to develop a highly innovative “ethical pathway”. This will have animal welfare at its heart together with other important ethical dimensions linked to commercial practice fit for the 21st century.
Who came up with the idea?
I did. Following the publication of a blog piece I wrote for CASJ (http://www.casj.org.uk/blogs/grappling-political-attention-case-dog-welfare/) I was invited by CARIAD and Marc Abraham to meet them and find out more about their work. We met at the end of October. I was blown away by what I heard at that meeting. Their passion and energy for transforming animal welfare is inspirational. It is also clear from the evidence they collect on pets, that there is a massive opportunity, for the industry to address animal welfare issues more directly and a massive opportunity for the trade to do real, meaningful good for pet welfare. On my journey home from meeting Marc and CARIAD, I started thinking about the business gurus who have so much to say about environmental and sustainability issues, people like Peter Senge and Tim Jackson, and I realised immediately that the world of commerce has not been saying much about animal welfare. Or if it has been talking about animal welfare those messages are being lost. So then I got thinking about how we could create a means for business to get much more involved with the ethics around pet ownership and companionship.
Who's the driving forces behind EPIC?
At the moment it is mainly just myself. But over the coming weeks, in consultation with the industry, we will put together a governance framework that will include some keen and passionate major players from the industry.
What are your aims and objectives?
Our aim is to support a pet industry that demonstrably puts animal welfare at its heart. It is about producing an ethical pathway that signposts all pet related businesses to practices and protocols that continue to deliver profit for them and their shareholders, but that also deliver the highest possible standards for pet welfare. Profit and ethical pet ownership are NOT mutually exclusive concepts.
Who can become a member of EPIC?
Any business that derives all or part of its revenues from the activity of owning a pet is eligible to get involved.
What benefits do you offer to members?
An innovative and supportive membership package will emerge during the consultation process over the coming few months. So although I cannot tell you the detail of that right now, what I can tell you is, it will offer members a very exciting opportunity to demonstrate their ethical and social responsibility credentials. There will also be a portfolio of more traditional support such as leadership and management development and strategic signposting.
Is animal welfare becoming more important in the public's eyes?
My research in preparing to launch EPIC shows that animal welfare is of huge importance to many parts of our society. There is more animal welfare science now emerging from our Universities than ever before. There is inevitably going to be more legislation around the world, focused on securing better animal welfare, and the trend in ethical consumerism is upward. The public have expressed their concerns over animal welfare issues in their hundreds of thousands through the many animal related e-petitions they have signed. The public are expressing their concerns more loudly through the communicative abundance that is social media. Any enterprise carrying out traditional SWOT and PESTLE analyses will explore these issues in relation to their business plans. They may well allocate these societal shifts to the “threat” category of their SWOT. At EPIC, we want to support those enterprises and help them understand that those “threats” can easily become “opportunities” for business, and the trade needs to listen to the growing concerns about pet welfare held sincerely by the public.
What challenges does the pet industry face?
Challenges for the pet industry are similar to those faced by all industries. Pressures on costs, increased competition, much of which is global (even for small businesses), the speed of technological change, everyone being forced to do more with less, lack of capital, and of course there are the environmental issues. In addition to all those the pet industry has one other dimension to the challenges it faces. That dimension is animal welfare. The single biggest threat to the industry is poor animal welfare. Society is shifting in its views about how we use animals, and you have to include pet companionship in that too, the expectations now held by the public are, quite rightly, much higher than ever before. EPIC is all about helping our members navigate those shifting sands around animal care, health and welfare. We are determined for good businesses to prosper, but most of all EPIC wants the pets themselves to share in that prosperity by safeguarding all aspects of their wellbeing.
Can you see any conflict of interests with other pet industry organisations?
I would hope that the aspiration to secure higher pet welfare standards doesn’t clash with anyone in the industry.
How can pet businesses get involved with EPIC?
Any pet business wanting to get involved in the consultation process with EPIC would be welcomed. Contact info@ethicalpettrade.co.uk, visit www.ethicalpettrade.co.uk, and follow on twitter @EPICpetsuk
