Animal behavior and well-being symposium: Farm animal welfare assurance: science and application.
نویسندگان
چکیده
Public and consumer pressure for assurances that farm animals are raised humanely has led to a range of private and public animal welfare standards, and for methods to assess compliance with these standards. The standards usually claim to be science based, but even though researchers have developed measures of animal welfare and have tested the effects of housing and management variables on welfare within controlled laboratory settings, there are challenges in extending this research to develop on-site animal welfare standards. The standards need to be validated against a definition of welfare that has broad support and which is amenable to scientific investigation. Ensuring that such standards acknowledge scientific uncertainty is also challenging, and balanced input from all scientific disciplines dealing with animal welfare is needed. Agencies providing animal welfare audit services need to integrate these scientific standards and legal requirements into successful programs that effectively measure and objectively report compliance. On-farm assessment of animal welfare requires a combination of animal-based measures to assess the actual state of welfare and resource-based measures to identify risk factors. We illustrate this by referring to a method of assessing welfare in broiler flocks. Compliance with animal welfare standards requires buy-in from all stakeholders, and this will be best achieved by a process of inclusion in the development of pragmatic assessment methods and the development of audit programs verifying the conditions and continuous improvement of farm animal welfare.
منابع مشابه
Application of welfare assessment to commercial livestock production.
Farm assurance schemes are an inevitable and essential part of the UK livestock industries as they provide valuable assurances to the market over food safety, nonhuman animal welfare, and environmental concerns. However, there is potential for welfare assessment within such schemes to extend beyond existing resource-based parameters to include outcome-based observations of the behavior and phys...
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متن کامل
Board-invited review: the ethical and behavioral bases for farm animal welfare legislation.
Concerns about farm animal welfare vary among individuals and societies. As people increasingly consider the values underlying current farm animal production methods, farm animal welfare policy debates have escalated. Recent food animal protection policies enacted in the European Union have fueled highly contentious discussions about the need for similar legislative activity in the United State...
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Based on production guidelines, organic livestock farming has set itself the goal of establishing environmentally friendly production, sustaining animals in good health, realising high animal welfare standards, and producing products of high quality. By striving for these goals, organic livestock farming meets the demands of an increasing number of consumers who are critical of conventional pro...
متن کاملPig in the middle: farmers and the delivery of farm animal welfare standards
Purpose This paper examines the attitude of UK pig farmers to the delivery of improved farm animal welfare standards and investigates how they contribute to this objective through their membership of a range of different farm assurance schemes. Design/methodology/approach The analysis focuses on three main groups of pig farmers: (i) farmers engaged in conventional farm assurance schemes; (ii) f...
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Journal of animal science
دوره 89 4 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011