02/12/2024
This article first appeared in the summer 2024 edition of Meat & Livestock Australia's Feedback magazine.
A pioneering initiative is underway to create a better system capable of interpreting animal welfare.
It will use data being collected on livestock export vessels to help inform real-time decision making and improve welfare outcomes.
Over the past decade, the livestock export industry has dedicated substantial resources to identifying animal welfare measures.
This latest project commenced in June 2024 and will span over two years. It’s funded by the Livestock Export RD&E Program (a collaboration between LiveCorp and MLA) with research led by the University of Western Australia (UWA).
Lead researcher Professor Shane Maloney, a teaching and research academic at UWA, said the project has potential benefits for livestock producers, and beyond.
“If we're successful, the system could be adopted by many other animal industries, including zoos and aquariums,” he said.
“The opportunities are endless if we can successfully apply this system to livestock voyages.”
Animal welfare measures
Shane is an internationally recognised scientist in the field of thermoregulation and energetics in large mammals.
His expertise and experience working on previous research for the livestock export industry will be valuable in refining existing animal welfare indicators to develop the new system.
“We're adopting a multidisciplinary approach to better understand the complex landscape of animal welfare,” he said.
“The research team behind the innovative project consists of academics from a wide range of disciplines including statistics, thermal physiology, endocrinology, animal welfare and neuroscience.
“Our aim is to develop a model to tell us if the welfare of a group of animals is 'good' or 'bad', based on the interaction between a range of factors, while recognising there is a large grey area in those extreme states of welfare.
“We also need to deal with sometimes contradictory measures and determine which ones should have the most weight.”
Industry alignment
Aligning with the livestock export industry is pivotal to the success of this project, so the team will collaborate with a consultative committee consisting of industry representatives. The committee will ensure that the industry's voice is heard, and that the project will yield practical outcomes.
The project aims to refine existing animal welfare measures by using data being collected on every voyage, with the ultimate goal of developing a comprehensive system that can create objective scores. Following this, the scores would need to be validated by conducting onboard data collection.
“The system will enhance the industry's ability to evaluate risks by focusing on the indicators with the greatest impact on welfare,” Shane said.
“For exporters, this will come through overall welfare scores for their individual consignments, and for shipboard personnel, they will receive alerts to emerging issues during a voyage.”
When developed, the system promises to provide industry with an additional method to deliver transparent reporting of its performance to the community, to demonstrate that it is meeting and exceeding animal welfare expectations.