 replacing existing buildings and equipment with higher welfare systems often involves very large capital outlay costs. However, these costs will be much reduced if the change is delayed until the existing facility has reached the end of its working life;  where a producer is constructing a new building (rather than replacing an existing one) the capital costs entailed in selecting a higher w...

Historically, expenditure on animals and attitudes toward animal welfare have improved, with increasing social affluence. However, recent events suggest veterinary attitudes may be lagging behind those of the general public. Despite widespread public opposition to, and in some cases the passage of legislation against, the force-feeding of ducks and geese during foie gras production, the export ...

2. There are a number of minimum standards where the animal welfare implications are self-evident and require no explanation for their inclusion. NAWAC has decided that it will not provide comment on these minimum standards or recommended best practices, but will provide explanations on minimum standards which it believes are complex or controversial or on which it received submissions with sig...

This article examines the welfare consequences of moral hazard, and brings together several arguments suggesting that, in many cases, the additional consumption associated with health insurance could be welfare enhancing. Since conditions for maximum economic efficiency fail to hold in the market for medical care, the theory of the second best is useful. We focus on three efficiency-related rea...

Industralized cattle production is presently the subject of great changes, which in some respects have great detrimental impact on the animals. Modern intensive production systems often disregard the animals’ behavioural needs, causing unnecessary stress and disease. In the light of Swedish cattle husbandry standards, housing, management, feeding, transport and slaughter practices, and animal w...

One of the first ISO digital camera standards to address image microstructure was ISO 12233, which introduced the SFR, spatial frequency response, based on the analysis of edge features in digital images. The SFR, whether derived from edges or periodic signals, describes the capture of image detail as a function of spatial frequency. Often during camera testing, however, there is an interest in...

On November 13, 1997 the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control Approved regulation R.61-43, Standards for the Permitting of Agricultural Animal Facilities. The State Legislature approved these standards on June 26,1998. The primary purpose listed for setting these standards is “To establish standards for the growing or confining of swine, processing of swine manure and o...

Energy conservation and greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement have been included in the national development strategy of China, however, the rigidity in command-and-control, absence of market-mechanism and arbitrariness in assignment of abatement burden across regions have caused unnecessary losses in both economic efficiency and social equity. In this paper, we established an Inter-Regional CGE model...

Just occasionally, a landmark event triggers lasting animal welfare change. So it was for farm animal welfare with a book called Animal Machines published in 1964 by Ruth Harrison (Harrison, 1964). The book alerted the general public to the suffering of intensively farmed calves and chickens and prompted the Brambell Report that developed a list of five freedoms for farmed animals and prompted ...