Assessing farm animal welfare – guidelines for on-farm self-assessment

Abstract

The Animal Welfare Act from 2014 requires that livestock keepers shall execute an on-farm self-assessment. They have to assess and monitor appropriate indicators in order to evaluate the welfare of their animals. However, the Animal Welfare Act does not contain any secondary legislation, so there is a lack of more precise provisions regarding details and scope of the self-assessment system. In order to identify appropriate indicators which address the most important animal welfare problems known from practice, KTBL organised expert group discussions. The sets of largely animal-based indicators for cattle, pigs and poultry selected by the experts were published in 2016 in descriptive manuals. This paper discusses the benefit of on-farm self-assessments and presents the manuals.