Assessing animal welfare on farms

When we go to the supermarket and pick up a meat product, there are all sorts of badges and logos relating to food standards. While the current labelling system can give us a pretty good idea of the environmental cost of producing the sausages we buy, it’s not so good at informing us about the welfare of the animals as they were being reared. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have sought to close this information gap by coming up with a reliable way to measure animal welfare across the different types of farm. This means that animal welfare can now, for the first time, be properly considered alongside other impacts of farming to help identify which farming systems are best. I spoke to Harriet Bartlett to find out how they did it…

Harriet - There were two main things we did with this particular study. Firstly, we made metrics - ways of measuring animal welfare that are compatible with these established ways that we measure other things. So for example, if we talk about carbon footprints, we have very established ways of measuring a carbon footprint that's very strict and it's called a life cycle assessment. And they're being used quite widely, but we don't have an equivalent for welfare. And so what we did is we created an animal welfare metric using the rules from carbon footprinting. So we've got a kind of standardised and rigorous way of quantifying animal welfare. And then the second thing we did was we then collected this data from a broad range of UK pig farms from those that had no certification or labelling all the way through to organic and woodland farms. So we could actually see the outcomes for animal welfare.

James - Practically, how do you assess animal welfare on a farm? What are those key considerations?

Harriet - I used what's called welfare quality method, and they're one of the most rigorous sets of welfare assessments. So I'll be looking for everything from specific health problems and recording how common they are through to looking and observing the behaviour. And so that gave me the measure of quality of life. But we developed them in a couple of ways. We added time - because if you have two farms, for example, that had equally poor levels of quality of life, but one had twice as many animal life years experiencing that quality of life to produce your sausage, then that should be accounted for in a metric.

James - And of those which came out on top for animal welfare and which performed not so well?

Harriet - We did find within a type there was sometimes quite a lot of range. So they varied, but in general the best were woodland farms and then organic, then free range, then RSPCA assured, then red tractor, then those with no certification or labelling. But a big caveat there is that this is just looking at welfare and when we're choosing the best products and promoting the best ways of farming, we can't just think about welfare, we need to think about this broad range of things including environmental impacts. And really the aim of our study is firstly to provide some of this data for welfare but to also provide those metrics. So in the future we can explicitly include things like carbon and animal welfare when we're choosing the kinds of products that we want to eat or choosing the ways that we're farming.

James - Your goal here is not to make it more complicated, it's to synthesise the various labelings we've got now into a couple of scores, basically, of some of the key factors that ethical consumers might want to weigh up when purchasing a meat product.

Harriet - Exactly. And I think it's also a step back from that. So not just thinking about the consumers and specific labels, it's thinking about the types of farms that we want to be promoting. Because we've actually measured the consequences for carbon biodiversity, animal welfare, all these different things and they've come out on top. We're pretty good now at measuring environmental impacts, but we're really not very good at measuring welfare. So often welfare is assumed or sometimes it's even ignored. Whereas now we've got the metrics in place so that it can be incorporated into these broad sustainability assessments, so consumers can make the choice about the products they want, but also retailers and farmers can choose about how they're farming and ways that they're farming.

James - And I'm assuming that often farms that score quite highly on animal welfare might on the other hand be the most resource intensive when it comes to rearing. So is that just an unfortunate state of affairs or is that not the story that you were seeing when you went to visit those farms?

Harriet - A couple of weeks ago, another paper came out where we looked at land use and antibiotic use and we found there was this trade off: in general, the more intensive farms had lower land use requirements, they needed less land to produce a kilo of pork but they had higher antibiotic use. But we actually found that there were lots of farms that were exceptional and really quite well performing in both. So, I think sometimes there's this story of these tradeoffs and inevitable compromises, but it hasn't really been tested. And actually we've done the same study on welfare, land use, greenhouse gas emissions and animal welfare. And so I'll be able to answer that question for you hopefully in a few months time.

James - I think everyone probably agrees that we need to eat less meat and is this research facilitating a way we can reduce how much meat we're consuming, but the stuff we are consuming, we know that it's as sustainable as it can be.

Harriet - Yeah, exactly. I think sometimes there's a bit of a forced dichotomy between changing consumption, eating less, and improving farming practices when the evidence shows that we need to be doing both and we need to be doing both pretty quickly. And you're right, we can't ignore the consumption issue. Globally, we're reproducing four times the amount of meat we produced in the 1960s. And we know without a change, our food system on its own will mean that we can't meat the 1.5 degree targets that we need to to keep away the worst effects of climate change. So even if we stopped all fossil fuel use, our food system on its own would mean we can't meet that target. But there's also evidence that we don't all need to go vegan and that dietary change is slow. So it's still important to figure out how to produce meat as sustainably as we can.