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Kamara Scott presents Oral paper 27
In session 5: Development and improvement of welfare assessment protocols
Friday, 12 September 2008 from 12h00-12h15 in the Aula chaired by Linda Keeling
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Oral paper 27
EVALUATION OF A PROTOTYPE WELFARE MONITORING SYSTEM
FOR SOWS AND PIGLETS (WELFARE QUALITY PROJECT®)
K. Scott 1 , G. Binnendijk 2 , S.A. Edwards 1 , J.H. Guy 1 , M. Kiezebrink 2 , H. Vermeer 2
1 School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
2 Animal Sciences Group, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Netherlands.
Purpose This research was carried out as part of the Welfare Quality® project, which aims to
develop a European on-farm welfare assessment standard for pigs, as well as cattle and poultry.
Using a combination of information available in the scientific literature and preliminary pilot
studies, separate prototype welfare monitoring protocols were developed for sows and piglets
(breeding herd), fattening pigs (finisher herd) and pigs at slaughter.
Methods The prototype welfare assessment protocol was devised using a combination of animal-
(e.g. skin lesions, health measures, behaviour) and resource-based measures (e.g. stocking density,
environmental enrichment provision) to assess pig welfare. Pilot studies are being carried out on a
wide variety of farming systems (e.g. outdoors, deep-straw, organic, fully-slatted, stalls) in order to
assess how practical the measures are, their prevalence, and to develop a large database so that
typical scores can be bench-marked. Data from a total of 90 farms (allocated equally between the
UK and the Netherlands) are in the process of being collected.
Results Approximately 50 farms have been visited so far. Preliminary data analysis indicates the
prevalence of severe vulval lesions, body lesions, bursitis and extremely poor body condition for
individual dry sows as 1.8, 1.0, 0.7 and 0.2% respectively, with a range of 0-13.3, 0-16.7, 0-6.7 and
0-6.7% prevalence respectively for individual farms. System comparisons can only be reliably
made once the full data set has been collected. System design affects practicality of some measures;
for example, on outdoor farms, it is often difficult to achieve close proximity to the sows due to the
large paddock sizes typically found, and to carry out behaviour observations in poor weather.
Conclusions The complete data set will enable a refined final on-farm welfare monitoring system
for sows and piglets to be developed and benchmarks established.
Contact information: Kamara Scott or email Kamara.Scott@ncl.ac.uk
Complete address: School of AFRD Agriculture Building Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU and School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, Newcastle
University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK
Species: Pig