Abstract

Consumers' perception of food quality is not only determined by its overall nature and safety but also by the welfare status of the animal from which it was produced. In other words, animal welfare is an important attribute of an overall 'food quality concept'. Recent surveys carried out by the European Commission (e.g. [1,2]) as well as studies within Welfare Quality®, confirm that animal welfare is an issue of considerable significance for European consumers and that European citizens show a strong commitment to animal welfare. Consumers' concern and the apparent demand for information on animal welfare was the starting point of an EU funded project – Welfare Quality® [3]. This project started in 2004 and became the largest piece of integrated research work yet carried out in animal welfare in Europe. The Welfare Quality® project is a partnership of 40 institutions in Europe and, since 2006, four in Latin America. The partners are based in 13 European countries and four Latin American (Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Mexico). The present paper describes the rationale, objectives and approach of Welfare Quality® Although the originally formulated goals have evolved as results emerged and as opportunities arose, the main aims still stand: - To develop practical strategies/measures to improve animal welfare, - To develop a protocol for the assessment of animal welfare on-farm and at slaughter, - To develop a protocol to translate assessment data on animal welfare into product information, - To integrate and interrelate the most appropriate specialist expertise in the multidisciplinary field of animal welfare in Europe. Although countries outside Europe are involved, obviously this EU funded project mainly focuses on the European situation. From the start, Welfare Quality® took on board the results from a sociological study carried out in Europe that included an analysis of consumers' reluctance to purchase animal friendly products [4,5]. This study revealed that an important reason is the lack of transparent, reliable and easily understandable information about the way in which animal-based food products are actually produced. Furthermore, worldwide marketing strategies "confirm that producers and retailers today are ready to apply new criteria so as to provide consumers with extra value" [6]. The Welfare Quality® project therefore set out to develop scientifically based tools to measure animal welfare and to convert these measures into accessible and understandable information. Another major thrust of this project is to improve the welfare status of farm animals through the development and implementation of practicable, knowledge based, species-specific remedial strategies. Moreover, the welfare assessment systems developed in the present project can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses in animal husbandry systems and/or particular genotypes, to guide and monitor future remedial developments (e.g. new husbandry systems or breeding programmes that enable production of high quality, high welfare status food products), and to inform legislative initiatives. Animal welfare science is well developed in many countries in Europe and elsewhere. Welfare is multidimensional and it cannot be measured directly, rather it is inferred from external parameters. Therefore, welfare science is by definition multi-disciplinary [7], furthermore a variety of methodologies may be applied within disciplines (e.g. [8-11]). For these reasons, it is essential that we build on international collaboration in the broad field of animal welfare and that we integrate and interrelate the most appropriate specialist expertise in order to develop, refine, standardise and intercalibrate welfare measures and to identify and validate practical remedial measures

Published in

Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica
2008, Volume: 50, number: Supplement 1

SLU Authors

• Blokhuis, Harry

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

UKÄ Subject classification

Animal and Dairy Science
Veterinary Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1751-0147-50-S1-S10

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/18897