The 5 Rules Texas Roadhouse Follows For Ethical Meat Sourcing

Texas Roadhouse has gained an unusual reputation for combining steaks that taste impressively good with prices that won't make you want to run out of the restaurant, and the company's meat sources have a lot to do with that. Like many steakhouse chains, Texas Roadhouse uses USDA choice steaks, but it's been able to maintain lower prices than others through a variety of clever business schemes, including sourcing it's beef on long-term contracts that have insulated the chain from rising prices over the past few years. Texas Roadhouse also maintains quality control in it's beef sourcing through a variety of independent third-party inspectors. According to Texas Roadhouse's company policies, these inspectors not only ensure that guidelines around meat quality and antibiotic use are followed, but also "seek to ensure that the animals are treated with respect and cared for." This is done in a way that follows the so-called five freedoms of animal welfare. But what does that mean?

The five freedoms of animal welfare have evolved over time, but the accepted rules for decades have been freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain, injury, or disease, freedom to express normal behavior, and freedom from fear and distress. Some of these, like freedom from hunger and thirst or injury and disease are pretty self explanatory. Freedom to express normal behavior means animals must be given the space to act naturally and be allowed to live around their own kind. And Freedom from fear and distress is meant to avoid any mental pain and suffering.

The five freedoms of animal welfare originated in Britain back in the 1960s. After a British woman named Ruth Harrison wrote a book about the poor treatment of animals in food production, there was an outcry. A government investigation into the industry first established the idea that animals should have certain guaranteed freedoms to ensure that they were happy and healthy, and in 1979, those recommendations were codified by the British government into the five freedoms. Those freedoms have since been adopted by agencies around the world, and the American Humane society calls them the gold standard for animal welfare. Organizations like Texas Roadhouse now use them as a baseline to make sure that meat is ethically sourced.

While ethically sourced meat and animal welfare are important concerns in and of themselves, they also have other benefits. Ethically raised meat is generally higher quality than meat from animals that have been mistreated, and good animal welfare helps promote the sustainability of farms, both environmentally and financially. The five freedoms have been adopted by so many agencies and companies because they help not only animals but also have a positive impact on businesses and consumers too; a true win-win-win situation. While animal welfare will always be a contentious topic, the fact that chains like Texas Roadhouse are able to be so successful while following these freedoms is a truly positive sign for the future of animal welfare.