The ‘Real Welfare’ scheme: benchmarking welfare outcomes for commercially farmed pigs

Abstract

Animal welfare standards have been incorporated in EU legislation and in farm assurance schemes, based on scientific information and aiming to safeguard the welfare of the species concerned. Recently, emphasis has shifted from resource-based measures of welfare to animal-based measures, which are considered to assess more accurately the welfare status. The data used in this analysis were collected from April 2013 to May 2016 through the ‘Real Welfare’ scheme in order to assess on-farm pig welfare, as required for those finishing pigs under the UK Red Tractor Assurance scheme. The assessment involved five main measures (percentage of pigs requiring hospitalization, percentage of lame pigs, percentage of pigs with severe tail lesions, percentage of pigs with severe body marks and enrichment use ratio) and optional secondary measures (percentage of pigs with mild tail lesions, percentage of pigs with dirty tails, percentage of pigs with mild body marks, percentage of pigs with dirty bodies), with associated information about the environment and the enrichment in the farms. For the complete database, a sample of pens was assessed from 1928 farm units. Repeated measures were taken in the same farm unit over time, giving 112 240 records at pen level. These concerned a total of 13 480 289 pigs present on the farm during the assessments, with 5 463 348 pigs directly assessed using the ‘Real Welfare’ protocol. The three most common enrichment types were straw, chain and plastic objects. The main substrate was straw which was present in 67.9% of the farms. Compared with 2013, a significant increase of pens with undocked-tail pigs, substrates and objects was observed over time (P<0.05). The upper quartile prevalence was <0.2% for all of the four main physical outcomes, and 15% for mild body marks. The percentage of pigs that would benefit from being in a hospital pen was positively correlated to the percentage of lame pigs, and the absence of tail lesions was positively correlated with the absence of body marks (P<0.05, R>0.3). The results from the first 3 years of the scheme demonstrate a reduction of the prevalence of animal-based measures of welfare problems and highlight the value of this initiative.

Connecting Different Data Sources to Assess the Interconnections between Biosecurity, Health, Welfare, and Performance in Commercial Pig Farms in Great Britain

“…The results of correlation coefficients and the PCA were used in combination to understand the interconnection between health, welfare, and performance. Health and welfare indicators used in this study have been described in previous papers ( 18 , 21 , 49 ), and the results for our sample were consistent with these reports. However, several other interconnections between health, welfare, and performance are newly described in the current study.…”

“…The presence of missing values or necessary imputations might impair the data quality and the ability to conduct analysis with the data available. Data about pig health and welfare are regularly recorded by the Real Welfare and BPHS for the purpose of informing farm management decisions and aiding farm improvement, and cover a large majority of the fattening pig farms in Great Britain ( 6 , 18 , 21 ). There is a risk of discrepancies in the data recorded as nationwide data are recorded by several observers.…”

“…There is a risk of discrepancies in the data recorded as nationwide data are recorded by several observers. However, the standardized procedure and the training provided in each scheme were designed to minimize observer bias and were assessed in previous studies ( 18 , 21 ). Our study illustrates the challenge of using secondary data related to the pig industry and highlights the challenges regarding the data collection, the connection of different data sources and the design of a random sampling from the whole population of pig farms which is large enough to be representative of the commercial pig farms in the UK.…”

“…Herd visits took place between July 2015 and December 2016. After the visits, the prevalence of welfare indicators for the sample of fattening pig farms, collected during quarterly veterinary visits in 2015 and 2016, were acquired from the database of the AHDB Pork “Real Welfare” scheme ( 18 ) and the prevalence of different lesions recorded at the abattoir were acquired, for all batches assessed in 2015 and 2016, from the database of the AHDB Pork “BPHS” 1 (Table 1 ). The connection between the farm ID and the BPHS and Real Welfare databases was processed by AHDB to maintain confidentiality.…”

Health scores for farmed animals: Screening pig health with register data from public and private databases

“…Animal welfare and animal health scoring is therefore a matter of general scientific discussion [6]. Some of the scores or indices proposed are composed of animal based variables that are levied on the farm, for example, the "Real Welfare" scheme [27]. However, continuous on-farm assessment is time-consuming and expensive and therefore not feasible on a nationwide scale.…”