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Lookup NU author(s): Fanny Pandolfi, Professor Ilias Kyriazakis, Emerita Professor Sandra Edwards
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Animal welfare standards have been incorporated in EU legislation and in farm assurance schemes, based on scientific informationand aiming to safeguard the welfare of the species concerned. Recently, emphasis has shifted from resource-based measures ofwelfare to animal-based measures, which are considered to assess more accurately the welfare status. The data used in thisanalysis were collected from April 2013 to May 2016 through the ‘Real Welfare’ scheme in order to assess on-farm pig welfare,as required for those finishing pigs under the UK Red Tractor Assurance scheme. The assessment involved five main measures(percentage of pigs requiring hospitalization, percentage of lame pigs, percentage of pigs with severe tail lesions, percentage ofpigs with severe body marks and enrichment use ratio) and optional secondary measures (percentage of pigs with mild tail lesions,percentage of pigs with dirty tails, percentage of pigs with mild body marks, percentage of pigs with dirty bodies), with associatedinformation about the environment and the enrichment in the farms. For the complete database, a sample of pens was assessedfrom 1928 farm units. Repeated measures were taken in the same farm unit over time, giving 112 240 records at pen level. Theseconcerned a total of 13 480 289 pigs present on the farm during the assessments, with 5 463 348 pigs directly assessed using the‘Real Welfare’ protocol. The three most common enrichment types were straw, chain and plastic objects. The main substrate wasstraw which was present in 67.9% of the farms. Compared with 2013, a significant increase of pens with undocked-tail pigs,substrates and objects was observed over time ( P<0.05). The upper quartile prevalence was <0.2% for all of the four mainphysical outcomes, and 15% for mild body marks. The percentage of pigs that would benefit from being in a hospital pen waspositively correlated to the percentage of lame pigs, and the absence of tail lesions was positively correlated with the absence ofbody marks ( P<0.05, R>0.3). The results from the first 3 years of the scheme demonstrate a reduction of the prevalence ofanimal-based measures of welfare problems and highlight the value of this initiative.
Author(s): Pandolfi F, Stoddart K, Wainwright N, Kyriazakis I, Edwards SA
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Animal
Year: 2017
Volume: 11
Issue: 10
Pages: 1816-1824
Print publication date: 01/10/2017
Online publication date: 02/03/2017
Acceptance date: 19/01/2017
Date deposited: 10/03/2017
ISSN (print): 1751-7311
ISSN (electronic): 1751-732X
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1751731117000246
DOI: 10.1017/S1751731117000246
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