LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

PARALLEL SESSION 7A: CONSUMERS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
2.6. Animal welfare
Designing animal welfare criteria is difficult since the subjective experience of the animal is difficult to
quantify. The starting point for this indicator was the five freedoms for animal welfare originally developed
in a UK report on livestock husbandry in 1965 (FAWC, 2012) and now widely used as a basis for animal
welfare regulations by a number of organisations. These are: 1) Freedom from hunger and thirst, 2) freedom
from discomfort, 3) freedom from pain, injury or disease, 4) freedom to express normal behaviour and 5)
freedom from fear and distress. The judgement as to how these freedoms were met by different production
systems was made in collaboration with animal welfare experts. To be awarded a green light, the livestock
had to be kept according to Swedish animal welfare legislation (or similar legislation), which explicitly requires
the first four freedoms. In addition, to receive a green light there was a requirement on outdoor pasture,
which gives extra weight to freedom (4) and hopefully also freedom (5), which is impossible to measure.
This judgment is based on the assumption that animals can better express their natural behaviour in outdoor
environments with access to pasture, where their strong urge for food searching can be satisfied. Enriched
indoor environments can fulfil the same function, but today there are few such systems, and no verification
or certification that ensures that systems provide a certain level of opportunities for natural behaviour
and stimuli. To be given a yellow light the product had to come from systems that are either covered by
Swedish legislation on animal welfare or the like or from animals out grazing at least half the year. All other
systems were given a red light. The criteria for this indicator were not related to the functional unit of 1 kg of
product, but were based on production system level, and did not take into account the number of individual
animals affected by the production of 1 kg of meat.
3. Results
The beef part of the current guide is shown in Figure 1. Although the guide contains many simplifications
it still provides considerable amounts of information that allow a deeper understanding of the underlying
origins and causes of environmental impacts from livestock production, to which the target audience, food
professionals and interested consumers, are presumably receptive. For example, it can be seen that animal
welfare-friendly, pasture-based beef production, which keeps pastures open and helps conserve their rich
biodiversity and minimises the use of pesticides and antibiotics, is also associated with high emissions of
greenhouse gases.
4. Discussion
All simplifications involve difficulties in conveying a complete and fair picture. The meat guide presented
here has several limitations. All indicators are given equal weight, although the CF indicator acts as a proxy
for several other impact categories. For the biodiversity and animal welfare indicators, the criteria are not
developed from a life cycle perspective and do not relate to the functional unit of 1 kg of product. The animal
welfare criteria are set on production system level and do not consider the number of individual animals affected
in order to supply a certain amount of meat. Systems which account for this could be designed by e.g.
developing an equivalent to DALY (disability adjusted life years) for animals, as discussed by Blonk et al.,
(2010). Assessing biodiversity per kg of product could be made feasible through the development of characterisation
factors applicable for Swedish conditions.
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