Learning about welfare by analysing carcasses
It is the opposite of micromanaging – just let everybody get on with their job and as long as the end result is decent, everything is decent. So why not do that with pigs? After all, a pig carcass can tell a lot about the welfare conditions the animal lived in when it was alive. A current EU-funded project looks into practical solutions along those lines.
In order to sell animal products at the best possible price, it is important to take into consideration what consumers want. Obviously, consumers would like to have a tasty, safe and healthy product for the lowest possible price. However, they also increasingly look for products of higher animal welfare standards. In order to satisfy the demand, the range of premium products has increased to bridge the difference between conventional and organic, and to give the consumer a variety of options based on their willingness to pay more for animal welfare. That has come with a range of labels and, consequently, welfare assurance schemes.
Welfare assurance schemes
Animal welfare assurance schemes heavily rely on indicators of animal welfare. Those indicators can be based on the housing conditions, such as free range systems, but also on the state of the animals, especially their health. Representatives of labelling schemes would conduct their assessment at the farm, which is a time-consuming task and is only a single time point of a limited number of animals that are at that moment on-farm.
A potentially other route of gaining insight in animal welfare is to assess welfare indicators at the slaughterhouse. That has the potential to assess all slaughtered animals in a standardised and routinely manner, centralised at the slaughterhouses.
Assessment at the slaughterhouse
That is exactly what the project “aWISH” is about. The abbreviation stands for Animal Welfare Indicators at the Slaughterhouse, and is a four-year project funded by the Horizon Europe programme. It started in 2022 and will continue until late 2026. The project, which is coordinated by the Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO) in Belgium, and is a collaboration between 28 partners from 11 European countries.
Their aim is to develop and deliver the capacity to assess and improve the welfare of meat-producing animals across Europe. The main route to achieve this is by developing automated monitoring of animal-based welfare indicators at the slaughterhouse, and by providing advice to the meat sector on best practices.
Pilot sites at slaughterhouses
The project focuses on the pig and broiler production chain, with the collaboration of six slaughterhouses that operate as pilot sites. Pilot sites are located in the Netherlands, France, Spain, Poland, Austria and Serbia. For use in practice, those locations have installed, tested and refined new monitoring technologies for automatically scoring welfare indicators. Large meat processing companies, such as Vion Food and Plukon (headquartered in the Netherlands) and Batallé (Spain), are involved in implementing the technologies.
Pilot sites are collecting data for the development of a feedback tool. The eventual aim is to create a catalogue of animal welfare indicators and good practices guides that can be used by the meat sector, and can support producers to use the tools. By providing information and technology to the sector, the project aspires to improve animal welfare throughout Europe.
Technology for automatic monitoring
So far, aWISH has implemented 15 new technologies across six regional pig and broiler production chain pilots in Europe, resulting in 24 new installations. For pigs, the main pilots are located in the Netherlands and in Spain.
- In the Netherlands, Vion Food in the city Groenlo has implemented the PigInspector tool, by German company CLK. That device monitors ear, tail and skin lesions and tail length on carcasses. As skin, ear and tail lesions are important welfare indicators of damaging behaviour during rearing, it is a technology with high potential for routine welfare assessment.
- The slaughterhouse has also implemented the Stremodo sensors, in collaboration with the Research Institute for Farm Biology (FBN), Germany, which can identify stress vocalisations in the unloading area and lairage so that it can be identified when vocalisations would exceed the normal threshold.
- Additionally, Vion is collecting blood plasma samples for the analysis of stress-level indicators, again in collaboration with FBN.
- In Spain, Enviro-, Weight- and Lesion-Detect technologies by InnoTech got installed to gain insights about the climate inside the livestock houses. With this they can draw conclusions about temperature, relative humidity, concentrations of ammonia, CO2 and dust levels on the farms. In addition, the tools can also detect the animals’ weight and lesions. After the implementation of the technology in this pilot, a beginning respiratory disease was detected on-farm in the very first monitored batch, six days before clinical signs appeared. That shows not only the relevance to measuring welfare after production, but also in the opportunity to improve it during the animals’ life.
- Additionally, a Stunning Effectiveness technology, called Wel2Be, checks the consciousness after stunning through corneal reflex. Tear Staining monitoring technology by Wel2Be is also indicated, to assess the relevance of this potential welfare indicator.
Second phase of the project
In a second phase of the project, pig production chains located in Austria and Serbia are joining to test a selection of the technologies implemented in the first phase pilots. This serves as an external validation across different slaughterhouses. The PigInspector technology has already been installed in Austria; respective data will be collected shortly. The other installations in these pilots are planned in the upcoming months.
Prospects for the future
aWISH also implemented an expert panel, where experts from every point of the farm-to-fork chain can engage in discussions about the project results, sharing their insights and contributing to the achievement of the project objectives.
The project is halfway its four-year trajectory. So far, a list of animal welfare indicators for broilers has been developed and the technologies to measure each indicator were identified. The pilot sites are refining the functioning of the technology, and the data collected through these technologies will feed the aWISH data platform. The beta-version of the data platform will be released, tested and validated by the end of this year. Stakeholders along the production chain will be able to consult this platform and monitor results from their own farms and animals.
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