Scottish Animal Welfare Commission: Good Food Nation animal welfare indicators

6. Wider developments in EU and globally

We are aware of several relevant developments in this area in the EU and across the world, through our links and contacts in research and practice. The EU Partnership on Animal Health and Welfare has a number of priority areas for research and development that could be relevant in the future. The Knowledge Platform for Animal Welfare is designed to provide a means of integrating scientific and technical data on animal welfare to monitor welfare on farm, during transport and at slaughter (started Jan 2024, Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology, Spain is the coordinating institute). At present we believe this project is at a relatively early stage but we will continue to monitor activities and look for opportunities to replicate outcomes in Scotland if successful.

The Welfare footprint project, as mentioned previously, weights different intensities of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ across an animal’s lifetime. This approach requires detailed data on animal experience to be available and integrated to ensure some measure of validity, but the overall framework concept is likely very helpful.

An EU COST action, LIFT, is focused on developing positive animal welfare frameworks into farm assurance schemes. This project will run until 2026 and, although not focused on developing specific integrated systems, can provide further support for the need for positive welfare indicators, and may lead to further developments in the future.

ClassyFarm – This is an Italian innovation, led by the Italian Ministry of Health, and provides an integrated portal to collect data on the complex and related issues of animal welfare, farm biosecurity, herd health, production and feed, and slaughterhouse assessments of health (e.g. ling scores) and welfare (e.g. tail biting). Information comes from a range of sources, similar to those we suggest here, and is integrated into a single platform.