Indicators Relevant To Farm Animal Welfare PDF Download

The report describes the outcome of a Commission's two-year project looking at Member States' approach to ensuring animal welfare on farm. The project explored their use of quality management systems for official controls, their use of animal welfare indicators for measuring the extent and seriousness of animal welfare problems and the reliability of the data they collect and report. Although there are promising developments from private standards in identifying suitable animal welfare indicators which are accepted by both the agri-food sector and by competent authorities, there is today no single set of indicators that are universally used to measure the state or evolution of animal welfare at farm level. However, it would be feasible to establish specific and appropriate indicators for different farming systems or production sectors to monitor whether the animal welfare conditions are improving, remaining stable or worsening. In order to establish such indicators, a number of essential steps must be taken, such as defining a clear objective, determining the starting state and implementing a monitoring process. Different interest groups are already using animal welfare indicators extensively (competent authorities, producers, private veterinarians). The data collected and reported by Member States reflect individual legal requirements without providing a clear judgement of the severity of the problem, and they do not give a picture of the animal welfare situation. The EU and its Member States face challenges when assessing compliance and compliance trendswith the legal requirements on animal welfare at farm level. This is because they have not set specific objectives nor baselines (points of comparison) and they have not defined how they intend to monitor progress. Member States approach to animal welfare is incoherent regarding the setting of policy objectives, use of indicators and analysis to inform future actions. This absence of objectives, baselines and indicators is common across many national projects that seek EU funds to improve animal welfare over and above the minimum legal requirements. The absence of all necessary elements (objective/target, indicators and monitoring system) before implementing the project makes it difficult to evaluate the real impact they have on the animals' wellbeing. Establishing the real state of welfare of animals is complex, because it depends on aspects such as health, environment and their ability to express natural behaviour. The current methods to determine the actual welfare of the animals on farms are generally time consuming and thus they increase production costs. Introducing automatic monitoring technologies at farm level and monitoring at other levels (e.g. slaughterhouses) may address some of these difficulties in the future. Overall, it appears that authorities only used animal welfare indicators when they were part of the legal requirements. They are however slowly moving towards incorporating indicators beyond those prescribed in legislation to assess the welfare of animals during their official controls. When authorities use indicators their controls provide a better assessment of the real state of welfare of animals at farm level. The majority of the EU requirements for animal welfare at farm focus on the provision of resources rather than animal based requirements. The European Commission could explore the feasibility to include animal welfare indicators within the current review of EU animal welfare legislation, looking at different types of possible purposes: to determine compliance trends in this area and support enforcement efforts, to provide feedback to farmers and help them improve their practices, and to gather macro-level data on the state of welfare of farm animals in order to inform policy-making at EU and national level.