EU eyes more flexible welfare assessments
Animal welfare regulation may feel like something UK farmers have been tied down with for years, but in fact, it is a fairly recent issue at EU level. On a recent trip to the European Commission, organised by BPEX and EBLEX, policy officials revealed there was a need for improvement in knowledge of animal behaviour and welfare.
Denis Simonin, director general for general health and consumers at the commission admitted the current approach to assessing welfare offered “no flexibility” and said there was going to be a “shift in the way they wanted to legislate and make policy”.
“We need the new approach to assessing welfare to be more business and outcome related. The old approach offers no flexibility. For example, space allowance is set and there is no flexibility within that,” he said.
And one of the strategies the commission has been working on in order to help assess and improve welfare across the board has been the use of “welfare indicators” as a form of on farm assessment.
What are welfare indicators?
Welfare indicators are a set of measures that can be used on farm to assess animal welfare. It is a way of demonstrating welfare from the pig’s perspective. For example, lameness incidence, tail lesions, shoulder lesions and hospitalisation are the type of indicators that could be used.
A huge amount of scientific work has already been completed across the EU looking at using welfare indicators on farm. However, Dr Simonin explained that this was scientific work and was not something that could be applied currently on a daily basis.
“The work already completed is a starting point for reflection. We need to build on the experience on how this will be implemented and we need a methodology on how the indicators will work. This will be done progressively,” he said.
How will welfare indicators work?
A lot of member states however, believe that indicators alone will not work and will need some prescriptive legislation in order to be fully effective. But as Dr Simonin explained, welfare indicators could work alongside legislation and could also help simplify things.
“Outcome based indicators could be a way of simplification. For example, if there are some particular requirements farmers do not want to stick to, the trade off could be that they have to be assessed on certain welfare indicators to make sure the welfare of the animal is right.”
When could this affect me?
Dr Simonin believes indicators will work alongside legislation but said in terms of the time frame they had to be realistic and make sure it was not too time consuming for the farmer before implementing.
“Risk based assessments could help make things less time consuming for the farmer so they don’t have to record everything. This could identify where the biggest risk to animal welfare could be and monitoring and evaluation can then be based on the risk.”
Farms in Finland have already started implementing some welfare indicators and in fact, there are already a number of indicators used in the industry.
“There are already indicators that exist that could be monitored and potentially used to assess welfare. For example, slaughter houses may record lesions and these could be used for welfare.
“The idea now is to create the opportunity for member states to begin testing with the idea of putting forward a legislative proposal in 2014.”
Work on welfare indicators in the UK
BPEX has been leading a major research project to develop a system of assessing pig welfare using welfare outcomes as indicators. Indicators such as lameness, tail lesions, and hospitalisation for finisher pigs’ and body condition score, shoulder and vulva lesions for sows have been the type of welfare indicators used to assess welfare on farm.
More than 20 pig vets have been involved in the study and trained in what the measures were and how to assess welfare using them, with more than 90 pig farms also involved.
Vets have been using these indicators during quarterly farm visits, to build up a set of anonymous data and to identify typical values to benchmark welfare. The assessments have covered finishing pigs in straw and non-straw systems as well as indoor and outdoor breeding sow systems. Assessments can also be a useful tool to help improve productivity by working as a catalyst for informed discussions between vets and producers on ways to fine-tune management.
The project aims to establish benchmarks for real pig welfare that work across all types of production system and results will be available later this month.