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| Background and contexts:
definitions and assessment of welfare |
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An
applied review of pig welfare and assessment structures
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Fundamentally,
the term 'animal welfare' encompasses our ethical concerns about the
quality of life experienced by animals, particularly animals kept in
production agriculture. With the increasing scale and elevated
efficiency of animal production, welfare issues have become
increasingly important. A wide range of groups have an interest in
welfare assessment, including the farming community, legislators,
consumers and scientists. Over the past decennia, there has been a
shift in public opinion and awareness of welfare-related issues; the
media have been influential in raising the profile of welfare issues.
Concurrently, scientific methodology has been applied to identify,
interpret and implement societal concerns; this has increased our
understanding and provided us with more objectively defined measures
and criteria for assessment. Legislation and regulatory measures have
been put in place. Consequently, a large and diverse body of literature
exists on the subject, in the form of scientific publications,
legislation, industry codes, consumer reports, agricultural and popular
media articles etc.
Definition and interpretation of welfare are subjective activities, and
are fundamentally guided by philosophical and ethical principles. The
difficulty of objectively ascertaining, demonstrating and measuring the
various criteria which collectively determine welfare has led to an
array of definitions, perspectives and indicators of assessment. No
precise scientific definition can be given.
The objective of this section is to provide a brief overview of current
opinion and understanding, including components of assessment protocols
and a comparison of assessment structures. This will inform the
development of indicators for on-farm assessment of welfare.
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Current
provision and operational assessment structures of pig welfare
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This section aims to provide a brief review of the
legislative,
regulatory and monitoring structures, including systematic welfare
assessments, currently in place in some of the leading pig-producing
areas of the world. It briefly presents the institutions charged with
overseeing the legislation, any affiliated advisory, policy-making or
monitoring bodies, consumer-diven quality assurance schemes, industry
initiatives for monitoring of welfare, and scientific research groups
and consortia. While it is recognised that animal rights advocacy
groups (e.g. PETA, WSPA,
SAFE, the Humane
Society, Animals Australia)
can be highly influential in raising public awareness and lobbying for
change, these will not be discussed unless they actively play a role in
the development of welfare assessment systems. By necessity, this
review will be selective; a fairly exhaustive list of links to
organisations with any relevance to pork production is given on the Pig
Site.
The
objective is to give a comparative overview. Hence, the current
situation in New Zealand is presented first. Subsequently, the
situation in Australia, Great Britain, Europe and the United States is
discussed; primarily to illustrate similarities and conversely,
notable differences. |
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