You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time,
but you cannot please all the people all the time
(variation on a quote from Abraham Lincoln).

In order to reach our Welfare Quality® target, we hope that we will succeed in achieving a science-based monitoring system by which everybody can see that their personal concerns about the way animals are kept, managed and handled are addressed in a serious way. Welfare Quality® will have come a long way towards achieving consensus between different groups of stakeholders when it puts forward it monitoring systems, but that is not the end of the process. There are areas of concern for which we do not have appropriate measurements at present, but the science of animal welfare is continuously developing new methodologies (we have, for example, few good measurements for positive emotions). As these are validated, they might become included in new versions of the monitoring system. It might also be that new findings prove that what we thought was an area of concern is less of a problem for the animals than we thought, or that a new aspect of the animal’s environment is cause for concern (e.g. not providing daylight).

So how far have we come towards the Welfare Quality® monitoring system? Actually, we have come a very long way, and we are planning to start the first testing of the full system in January 2007. In the first year, we decided upon the underlying principles, e.g. to focus on animal-based measures as much as possible, and agreed upon methodologies for checking the reliability of measures. We also identified the lists of potential measures for each of the categories of animal (cattle – calves, cows and bulls; pigs – piglets, sows and fattening pigs; poultry – layers and broilers) and we started to evaluate research proposals to carry out the work on the measures. The second year has focused on validating measures and testing these for repeatability and feasibility under commercial conditions. The results on the evaluations of the over 50 potential parameters will be completed in August and will have involved over 30 research groups across Europe. Besides contributing to the overall monitoring system, some of the research is original in its own right and researchers are presenting this work at international congresses. In this way, work in Welfare Quality® is a contribution to the overall knowledge on welfare assessment.

Parallel to this work, research has also been underway on how to integrate all these different measures into an overall welfare assessment. In this first year, the focus was on identifying both current techniques and problems when pooling information on animal welfare; in the second year, the focus has been on constructing the integration process. For example, it is planned to group the many different measures into 12 mutually exclusive welfare criteria: the absence of prolonged hunger and thirst; comfort around resting; thermal comfort and ease of movement; the absence of injuries and disease as well as the absence of pain induced by management procedures; and, finally, the expression of social behaviours, other behaviours, a good animal-human relationship and an absence of general fear. How exactly measures will be grouped to a single value for each of these 12 criteria depends on the nature of the data collected for that measure – e.g. a measure may be given as a score, the percentage of animal affected, or simply whether it was recorded or not. The different criteria will then be group to give overall scores for four principle questions: are the animals properly fed and supplied with water? Are the animals properly housed? Are the animals healthy? Does the behaviour of the animals reflect an optimised emotional state? When the answers to these questions are combined, we will have an assessment of welfare on a scale from good to bad that can be easily communicated to consumers. The process will be transparent and the information can be traced back to each individual measure and even from the start. This means that not only will the monitoring scheme give a measure of welfare to consumers and retailers, but farmers and slaughterhouses will be able to use the results of the individual measures to identify strengths and weakness in their housing and management.

Linda Keeling, Subproject leader
and Björn Forkman, Work Package leader

More information: linda.keeling@hmh.slu.se and bjf@kvl.dk