Public views on selecting cattle

The EC BovReg project on the functional genomics of cattle breeding, used a specially created Democs card game for public engagement to explain cattle breeding and genomics, and to explore ethical questions about breeding priorities and practices, with small groups of publics. Democs is an established public engagement tool to enable groups to explore technical issues through the medium of cards. During the project, a total of 20 Democs games were played by 118 people, primarily across the UK, Finland and the Netherlands (8th July 2021 - 31 August 2023). The main aim of the games was to engage publics with developments in cattle breeding and the factors and ethical issues which bear upon these.The outputs from the game also give some quantitative and qualitative data, helping us to understand how players expressed their views. Individual responses were invited from players on how important they considered five breeding goals (voting sheet A), questions about ethical limits to selection, on genome editing and on breeding for resilience (voting sheet B) , and how much extra they might be willing to pay for dairy or beef products produced from cattle bred for particular goals (disease resistance, reduced methane, animal health and resilience) (voting sheet C). The relatively small number of players and the self-selecting nature of the groups mean that these data reflect the sample of the people playing the game and cannot simply be extrapolated to wider publics. The willingness to pay extra is unlikely to represent actual values people are willing to pay, rather the question was used as a way of measuring strength of opinion on various applications of cattle breeding.Games with prefix J, T and JV were played in FinlandGames with prefix U were played in the NetherlandsGames with prefix D and BVGA1 were played by groups in international livestock meetingsGames with prefix S, R, E and H were played in the UK