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AWIN at SAC! New EU project to develop animal welfare indicators
Summary
Standardising welfare assessment across the EU is an important part of ensuring good animal welfare and cross compliance. A new project coordinated at SAC, involving 10 partner institutions across nine countries, will develop welfare assessment protocols for sheep, goats, horses, donkeys and turkeys. The project will also address pain assessment, assess the impact on welfare of early life experiences, and provide training and education materials in animal welfare.
Key Challenges
The search for valid reliable indicators for assessing animal welfare, especially at farm level, is an important objective of welfare research. Animal-based measurements of welfare are much more informative than resource based measures and provide a solid foundation for the development of legislation. It is important to develop animal-based measures that assess the actual welfare state of the animals in terms of their behaviour, health and physiology, yet can be readily applied on-farm.
Key Benefits
Animal welfare is one of the main topics in modern animal agriculture that has consistently ranked at the top of issues raised by consumers and politicians across European countries and in other parts of the world. Community surveys, like the Eurobarometer, indicate that animal welfare concerns among European citizens are founded in well thought through expectations from governments, industry and stakeholders (Eurobarometer, 2007). In addition, Europeans are concerned with the need to meet animal welfare standards in countries supplying the European markets with animal products. Thus standardised welfare assessment protocols will play a significant role in ensuring the welfare of animals within and supplying the EU, meeting a societal need.
“SAC research is coordinating a major new EU funded project in animal welfare, which will provide new welfare assessment protocols for five species.”
The overall impact from this project will be to promote transparency in addressing issues related to animal welfare science. We predict that the long-term sustainability of animal production systems will be positively influenced by a transparent relationship with “all” the interested parties. This project will offer instruments to promote transparency in issues related to animal welfare among all the actors involved. The outcomes of this project will be to have available, as a free resource, welfare assessment protocols, including pain, in donkeys, goats, horses, sheep and turkeys. Certification programs, commodity groups, farmers, supermarkets, and others will be able to access our instruments and test the validity and repeatability of the measures proposed. We will create a database, which will be anonymous, showing welfare enhancement targets, with simulation exercises to help moving welfare science away from the political debate and placing it together with other scientific disciplines. We also envisage more involvement of veterinarians addressing animal welfare related questions, an issue that has been a source of concern among European countries.
In total the EU has provided €4.5 million to support the development of welfare assessment protocols, with match funding provided by the Scottish Government for work carried out at SAC, and other sources of match funding in other Institutions. This funding will also provide the leverage to obtain further funding from other funding bodies.
Our Partners
The project is funded via EU FP7. The partners are: University of Cambridge, UK; University of Milan, Italy; Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway; Neiker-Technalia, Spain; Universidade Positivo, Brazil; Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal; Indiana University, USA; IASPrague, Czech Republic; Pferde Klinik, Germany.