Identifying areas of animal welfare concern in different production stages in Danish pig herds using the Danish Animal Welfare Index (DAWIN)

Abstract

Animal welfare is of increasing public interest, and the pig industry in particular is subject to much attention. The aim of this study was to identify and compare areas of animal welfare concern for commercial pigs in four different production stages: (1) gestating sows and gilts; (2) lactating sows; (3) piglets; and (4) weaner-to-finisher pigs. One welfare assessment protocol was developed for each stage, comprising of between 20 and 29 animal welfare measures including resource-, management- and animal-based ones. Twenty-one Danish farms were visited once between January 2015 and February 2016 in a cross-sectional design. Experts (n = 26; advisors, scientists and animal welfare controllers) assessed the severity of the outcome measures. This was combined with the on-farm prevalence of each measure and the outcome was used to calculate areas of concern, defined as measures where the median of all farms fell below the value defined as ‘acceptable welfare.’ Between five and seven areas of concern were identified for each production stage. With the exception of carpal lesions in piglets, all areas of concern were resource- and management-based and mainly related to housing, with inadequate available space and the floor type in the resting area being overall concerns across all production stages. This means that animal-based measures were largely unaffected by perceived deficits in resource-based measures. Great variation existed for the majority of measures identified as areas of concern, demonstrating that achieving a high welfare score is possible in the Danish system.

Assessing Animal Welfare Risk in Fibre-Producing Animals by Applying the Five Domains Framework

“…Our risk assessment tool was created by researching different existing protocols and their structure [19][20][21][22][23][24]. While these protocols are extremely comprehensible, they either do not offer the option of obtaining a single score from the assessment or are not really based on the Five Domains model and allowing for animals to be assessed on having positive experiences, both of which were our prerequisites.…”

“…To create the risk assessment tool, we first looked at all available welfare assessment protocols for farm animals and their structure [19][20][21][22][23][24]. The research was two-fold, with one focus on different available ethical frameworks used to define animal welfare as well as identifying a structure that can be used for a future score aggregation, such as the Five Freedoms [25], the Five Domains model [26,27], and the Welfare Quality ® (WQ) principles [28][29][30], considering we wanted to have one overall score.…”

“…This category requires immediate action to save animal lives and/or end prolonged suffering. Probability for poor animal welfare (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39) means that the risk of most painful and ethically questionable practices is high and that we would expect prompt short-term improvements, along with substantial changes to counteract poor welfare states of the animals. Probability for acceptable animal welfare category (40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46)(47)(48)(49)(50)(51)(52)(53)(54)(55)(56)(57)(58)(59) means that the risk of poor animal welfare states is present, but not very high.…”