Assessing housing and husbandry: what can we learn from the farm animal experience?

摘要

Welfare assessment exercises in laboratory animals are largely concerned with the period following procedures, rather than the whole lifetime experience of animals including those held in stock or kept for breeding. In most cases, the time spent undergoing procedures is often a short period of the animal's life in comparison with the time spent in the holding cage or pen, and so welfare problems can arise at any time between birth and death. Can laboratory animal welfare assessment be extended beyond procedures to include 'normal' husbandry and housing? Farm animal welfare assessment is usually approached differently in that the scoring systems set out in farm assurance schemes, e.g. the RSPCA "Freedom Food" scheme, are "provisions based". This means that they score what is provided for the animals in terms of housing, husbandry and care and reduction of painful procedures, rather than focusing solely on the animals themselves following procedures. The University of Bristol has been developing an'outcomes based' system for evaluating the welfare of farm animals that uses parameters such as (in cattle) the number of lame cows in a herd, assisted calving cases, dirty flanks, interaction with stockpersons, bedding type and presence of "rising restrictions" (this signifies poor pen design so that cows cannot get up comfortably). This approach is useful because it identifies areas where individual farms are either performing better than others or not as well - this encourages farmers to maintain good practice and improve weaker areas. In practice, no farm has been found to be consistently "good" or "bad" in all areas and the same is very likely to be true of designated establishments.