Scottish Animal Welfare Commission: Good Food Nation animal welfare indicators

1. Background

The Scottish Animal Welfare Commission (SAWC) received a request from the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands on 29^[th] May 2025 to provide recommendations on animal welfare indicators which could form part of measures in future iterations of the Good Food Nation (GFN) plan. The key request in this letter was:

‘Specifically, we want to ensure that animal welfare standards are maintained, enforced and improved in line with Scottish Government policy, and that livestock are reared and culled humanely with regard to the Five Domains of animal welfare. It will clearly be important to assess progress against this outcome with some meaningful, achievable indicators. These should not only allow us to measure progress, but also provide confidence to consumers that the food they are buying and consuming comes from animals which have been reared to high standards and culled humanely’.

[Note: sections in bold are those identified by SAWC as important components of the types of indicators we should be considering]

Discussions were held with the Scottish Government (SG) Animal Welfare Team to explore the request in more detail, and a Terms of Reference (ToR) document was provided in August 2025 (Appendix I). Animal welfare is mentioned in the draft GFN plan, which was laid before parliament on 27 June, and in the final GFN plan laid in Parliament on 17^[th] December, as Outcome 2:

Outcome 2: Scotland’s food system is sustainable and contributes to a flourishing natural environment on our land and in our waters. It supports our net zero and climate adaptation ambitions and plays an important role in protecting and improving animal health and welfare and in restoring and regenerating biodiversity.

Animal health and welfare falls under Sub-outcome 2C.

The current plan proposes four indicators covering limited aspects of animal health and welfare: the proportion of consumers that report animal welfare as a concern motivating food choices, the number of livestock animals inspected by local authorities every year, the proportion of laying hens in free range or organic systems and the prevalence of Bovine Tuberculosis (TB) in Cattle.

The ToR specifically requests future indicators that will help assess both progress in maintaining and improving animal health and welfare but will also reassure consumers that the food they are buying and consuming comes from animals who have been reared to high welfare standards. This latter point is relevant as this suggests that indicators are sought not only for animals that are born, reared and slaughtered in Scotland, but may also include the welfare of any animal, regardless of where it was reared or slaughtered, that enters the food chain in Scotland.

The ToR also requests indicators that would be available in the short to medium term, largely derived from existing data sources, and longer-term indicators which should consider possible directions for future work to develop more holistic animal welfare indicators (possibly from new data sources). Indicators should consider major farmed animal species, but not wild animals (we note, however, that wild animals, such as deer, hare or gamebirds do enter the human food chain). As in the original letter from the Cabinet Secretary, there is an emphasis on welfare indicators and not just those assessing health, and on the use of the Five Domains framework for animal welfare assessment^[1].

The purpose of this report, therefore, is to provide objective and independent recommendations on likely indicators to meet these needs which could be incorporated into future iterations of the GFN plan.