Content and structure of Swedish animal welfare legislation and private standards for dairy cattle

Abstract

In this study the animal welfare legislation and three private standards in Sweden, focusing on dairy cows, were analysed. The aim was to investigate to what extent these regulations consisted of resource-, management-or animal-based requirements, to analyse the content and discuss consequences. The results showed a higher proportion of management-and resource-based requirements than animal-based in all regulations. However, the borders between these categories were not as distinct as expected. The private standards put slightly more emphasis on the animal-based requirements and on animal welfare at herd level. It was primarily the organic standard that included higher animal welfare demands than the legislation. Due to vague wording and guideline statements it was not always clear if the welfare level achieved would be the same in practice although the requirements were similar. It will be necessary to clearly distinguish between requirements and measures to make the policy process more transparent. ARTICLE HISTORY

Private Animal Welfare Standards—Opportunities and Risks

“…In countries where animal welfare legislation has been described as limited or the official control insufficient, private standards have been reported to have improved the general animal welfare level, for example, in Brazil [ 22 ] and Canada [ 23 ]. In our project, there were both private standards aiming at roughly the same level as the legislation and private standards that had requirements on a higher level [ 16 ]. Also, Annen and co-workers (2011) found that private standards in Germany often tended to overlap with national legislation, and not necessarily provided better animal welfare, except for the organic standards.…”

“…Does this difference in wording indicate an actual difference in what is actually required? Hence, it was not always clear if the requirements in the regulations were practically identical or whether there was a difference [ 16 ]. Similar conclusions regarding ambiguities in animal welfare regulations have been identified also by others [ 29 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 ].…”

“…They have, however, not scrutinesed the relation between existing regulations and the effect of the control outcomes. Our project contained three sub-studies that focused on the intentions behind different animal welfare regulations [ 2 , 15 ], the content, and structure of different animal welfare regulations [ 16 , 17 ] and similarities and differences between on-farm assessment and inspection results based on different regulations [ 13 ].…”

“…The questionnaire was then followed by thorough systematic text analyses of the farm animal regulations as well as any preparatory work, explanatory notes, web pages and brochures that were published [ 2 ]. The second study was a summative description of four Swedish animal welfare regulations, followed by directed content analyses on the different sets of animal welfare regulations, including any corresponding audit or control guidelines [ 16 ]. The third study involved determining the actual outcomes of different animal welfare inspections using the same Swedish regulations as in the second study.…”

Brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) in urban ecosystems: are the constraints related to fieldwork a limit to their study?

“…Member states have to comply with these general principles. For example, in Sweden this is recorded in the Animal Welfare Act (1988:534) (AWA) and Animal Welfare Ordinance (1988:539) (AWO) (Lundmark et al 2016), in the UK in the Animal (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 (A(SP)A) (The National Archives 2018), and in France in the articles R214-87 to R214-137 of the BCode Rural^(Legifrance 2018).…”