Animal Welfare Indicators at the SlaughterHouse

Projektinformationen

aWISH

ID Finanzhilfevereinbarung: 101060818

DOI

10.3030/101060818

EK-Unterschriftsdatum 3 Juni 2022

Startdatum 1 November 2022

Enddatum 31 Oktober 2026

Finanziert unter

• Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment

Gesamtkosten

€ 7 999 587,50

EU-Beitrag

€ 7 999 587,50

Koordiniert durch

EIGEN VERMOGEN VAN HET INSTITUUT VOOR LANDBOUW- EN VISSERIJONDERZOEK
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - aWISH (Animal Welfare Indicators at the SlaughterHouse)

Berichtszeitraum: 2024-05-01 bis 2025-10-31

Zusammenfassung vom Kontext und den Gesamtzielen des Projekts

Animal welfare in livestock production is an important topic for the well-being of animals, the entire livestock sector, policy makers, and citizens. Broilers and pigs, the main meat-producing animals in the EU and worldwide, are the farm animals with the most animal welfare concerns expressed by EU citizens. EU legislation regulates farm animal welfare through resource-based measures, but there is a need for a large scale automatic monitoring of animal welfare using animal-based measures.

Animal-based indicators assessing the outcome of resources and management on the animals themselves are a good alternative and direct way for evaluating animal welfare. The slaughterhouse is a suitable place for assessing a large number of animals, as they come from various farms, which allows for high labour efficiency and better biosecurity. However, continuous and objective monitoring of outcome-indicators of each slaughter batch by humans is challenging without slowing down the line speed. Rapid technological development and artificial intelligence can overcome these limitations.

The aWISH project focuses on large-scale, automated welfare monitoring of animal-based indicators at the slaughterhouse, that are related to welfare on-farm, during (un)loading, transport, and slaughter. Novel sensors will be developed and tested to measure these indicators, enabling continuous and automatic data collection. The aim is to use this data for feedback and advice on best practices to those responsible for the broilers and pigs throughout their lifetime (farmer, catching team, transporter, slaughterhouse). This approach will be developed and evaluated in close collaboration with all actors involved, from the livestock farmers up to policy makers and citizens.

Arbeit, die ab Beginn des Projekts bis zum Ende des durch den Bericht erfassten Berichtszeitraums geleistet wurde, und die wichtigsten bis dahin erzielten Ergebnisse

The project’s core consists of six European pilots with multi-disciplinary teams including slaughterhouses, technology providers, researchers, and end-users like supplying farmers and transporters. These pilots are to develop and test the novel animal welfare monitoring technologies, test the aWISH feedback loop and collect data and insights for the project results. The pilots are divided into four first phase pilots leading the technology development and two second phase pilots as external validation sites.
aWISH has made significant progress towards reaching the specific objectives in the project. The main achievements are the following:

• Review the state-of-the-art animal welfare indicators for pigs and broilers, on farm, loading, transport and at slaughter;

• Review the state-of-the-art technologies to measure each animal welfare indicator;

• Incorporation of the reviewed animal welfare indicators and technologies in an interactive animal welfare indicator catalogue on the website;

• Implement and install the novel technologies of various technology readiness level (TRL) in the first and second phase pilots, leading to 22 installations at the moment;

• Increase the TRL levels of 16 novel technologies from TRL 2-8 (mean 4) to TRL 2-9 (mean 6);

• Set up validation guidelines and perform collaborative validation studies for the involved sensors;

• Development of 2 approaches to aggregate animal welfare indicators for welfare assessment at farm/chain/regional/national level, based on expert validation;

• Development of a functional, multilingual data platform and feedback tool with several user dashboards and >100 different visualizations of animal welfare indicators;

• Develop standardized data collection protocols to collect the necessary inputs for animal welfare, environmental and socio-economic evaluation for the supplying companies in each pilot;

• Development 8 summaries of best practice guides based scientific literature and surveys with experts, available on the data platform and on the aWISH website;

• Broad communication and dissemination of the project results through social media, website, 17 workshops and webinars, participations in 24 conferences and 28 publications (both conference papers and journal articles);

• Identification of needs, perceptions and barriers of all actors across the chain through stakeholder interviews and an EU wide consumer survey;

• Setting up an expert panel with 117 members to date, in order to create a participative approach with all stakeholders involved.

Fortschritte, die über den aktuellen Stand der Technik hinausgehen und voraussichtliche potenzielle Auswirkungen (einschließlich der bis dato erzielten sozioökonomischen Auswirkungen und weiter gefassten gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen des Projekts)

The project’s intended impact is to enhance the capacity to evaluate and monitor the state of animal welfare EU-wide, and to further improve animal welfare by providing best practices and innovative tools. In addition, environmental and socio-economic impact of the proposed practices will be integrated with the animal welfare assessment.

This has a large potential impact, as pigs and broilers are the biggest sources of meat worldwide and in Europe, and account for 51% and 30% of EU meat production, corresponding to roughly 257 million pigs and 7.8 billion broilers slaughtered annually. The pilots include some of the main producing countries covering different geographic areas of the EU and including different types of production. The expected impacts on livestock production and animal welfare are extremely large as aWISH foresees a concept and methodology that is inclusive, sector driven and multi-actor based, efficient and cost-effective, and scalable to other slaughterhouse sites, production countries and meat producing species.

Infographic about the objectives of the project

aWISH project logo

Infographic about the KPIs of the project