Assessing and improving farm animal welfare: The way forward

Abstract

The present chapter describes several approaches (as well as some essential requirements and conditions) to facilitate and support a harmonised and effective implementation of the Welfare QualityR assessment systems for diverse purposes. Even though Welfare QualityR was the largest ever collaborative project in animal welfare science, it could not possibly have covered all the questions and every detail (Blokhuis et al., 2010); indeed it generated new questions (Miele et al., 2011). So, it is not surprising that there are still unanswered questions and discussion points. These relate for instance to the development of animal-based welfare measures where these are currently not available, the necessary frequency of assessments, how to integrate new knowledge, and how to tackle practical issues of implementation. One particular obstacle to the widespread application of the existing Welfare QualityR protocols is the relatively large amount of time and effort needed for a complete welfare assessment on farm. Several follow-up initiatives now focus on exploring the feasibility of different ways of simplifying the protocols or finding shorter but efficient ways to implement the system. Firstly, for example the identification of reliable and meaningful 'sentinel' indicators, i.e. indicators that are likely to reveal major problems on a farm, or the design of risk models based on information on the living conditions of animals, could lead to more efficient assessments and/or the use of risk based audits with a farm visit oriented primarily or even exclusively towards major risks. Another line of current research investigates various methods of reducing the workload and time required by replacing some of the manual measures with automated ones, perhaps by using modern technology like sensors, sensing systems (image, sound, etc.) and real time modelling (Berckmans, 2008).

Published in

Title: Improving farm animal welfare : science and society working together: the Welfare Quality approach
Publisher: Wageningen Academic Publishers

SLU Authors

• Blokhuis, Harry

  • Department of Applied Animal Science and Welfare, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Animal and Dairy Science

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3920/978-90-8686-770-7_10
• ISBN: 9789086862160
• eISBN: 978-90-8686-770-7

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/132140