@start-1@After intensive collaboration, animal scientists working on the Welfare Quality project from Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Austria, Spain and Norway have identified ten key principles to use as a starting point for assessing the welfare of cattle, pigs and poultry on farms, during transport and at slaughter. The external Advisory Committee approved these principles last autumn and researchers are now developing and testing a range of specific measures that relate to each of these principles.
The main difference between the monitoring scheme that will come out of Welfare Quality and earlier schemes will be the emphasis on animal-based measures. This means measures that are taken from the animal itself, e.g. presence of injuries, how fat or thin the animal is and how fearful, as well as carcass-related measures such as meat quality or broken bones. It is the animal itself that best reflects how it is coping (or how it has coped) with its physical and social environment and so these are the best measures of welfare. Resource-based measures (e.g. @end-1@@start-2@space allocation, group size, temperature, ammonia levels etc.) and management-based measures (e.g. skill of stockperson, record keeping etc.) will also be considered, however these measures will assume less importance within the overall monitoring scheme as they only reflect risk, or potential benefit, to welfare rather than the animal's actual welfare state.
For the monitoring scheme to be widely accepted and implemented it must have a good scientific basis but it must also satisfy public, industry and political views of animal welfare. To ensure that all areas of welfare concern are being appropriately addressed, scientists working on the monitoring scheme have collaborated with social scientists researching the views of consumers, retailers and producers. Examples of areas of concern that have been highlighted by different groups of stakeholders are that the animal should: not suffer, be healthy, be physically comfortable, and be able to show natural behaviour. All of these concerns will be addressed within the monitoring scheme. More @end-2@