18/05/2021
An opinion piece by LiveCorp CEO Sam Brown, written for the Stock & Land newspaper and Farmonline group of rural news websites.
The process of developing a concise, but sufficiently comprehensive, set of indicators to measure animal welfare outcomes in livestock exports is challenging.
There are two key difficulties.
One is that ‘welfare’ is multi-dimensional. It needs to take into account both physical and mental state; many of the measures are subjective; and many on their own are not a true reflection of ‘welfare’. On top of this, environmental factors may affect the welfare of individual animals differently – just as some people love living in the tropics and some can’t stand the heat.
When the livestock export industry started exploring animal welfare indicators some years ago, one report suggested 364 options for industry to consider. More recent research looked at 80 potential indicators. The government’s recent review of shipboard standards, referred to as the Australian Standards for the Export of Livestock (ASEL), adopted up to 50 welfare measures.
The other difficulty is that the weighting given by community members to each aspect of welfare, and to welfare itself against other issues (including human well-being), is different. In the words of Hugh Millar*, an animal health and welfare expert now on an independent technical expert group for the livestock export regulator:
Animal welfare, though quite amenable to scientific study, is also founded in values based ideas about what people believe to be more or less desirable. There is no ‘absolute truth’.
Mortality rate, which has traditionally been used to measure welfare outcomes in live exports, has been rightly criticised when used as a sole indicator. However, this should not detract from mortality remaining as the central animal welfare indicator. As a measure, it is indisputable and increased mortalities are associated with many health and welfare issues.
A research goal of LiveCorp has been to supplement mortalities by providing a broader picture of the animals’ welfare state. Amongst other factors, this must provide insights into the level of comfort/discomfort, appropriate nutrition, absence of prolonged thirst, and provision of husbandry and veterinary care as well as other factors.
As a result of several years of research, we now have a comprehensive, standardised set of data being collected on a range of animal welfare indicators covering aspects of the animals themselves, their environment, and shipboard management practices.
Our work has fed into multiple regulatory reviews of welfare standards, and the department, as regulator, last year determined the measures it required to be collected and reported on for each livestock voyage from Australia.
LiveCorp research has not only assisted in determining the welfare measures to be collected, but has streamlined the data gathering process through construction of its collaborative data collection system – LIVEXCollect. This provides the templates to standardise the way the data is collected to enhance accuracy and support efficiencies.
Collecting welfare data in a systematic way will allow a greater level of analysis and transparency for the industry.
It’s ground-breaking - something never before done at this scale in livestock transport. While we still may not find an ‘absolute truth’, more information can only help all parties with an interest in the industry – from the regulator to the community – move toward a definition of ‘good performance’ when it comes to animal welfare.
* Final project report for Australian Eggs: A Review of Animal Welfare Policy and Assessment Frameworks, July 2018.