Animal welfare

Farmed animals are sentient beings and deserve a good quality of life and humane death. Animal welfare is not just about the absence of suffering, but about the provision of ‘what animals want and need’ so that they can lead healthy happy lives. An animal is considered to have good welfare when he/she is in good physical condition, has a strong mental state (for instance: confident, not fearful, or in pain) and is able to express important behaviours (such as foraging; dustbathing; making a nest; socialising).

Good animal welfare is underpinned by good feeding, housing / environment, health, breeding, and critically good stockmanship / management (animal care).

How we treat animals is our ethical and moral imperative; how they perceive their lives is their welfare state.

Introduction to the problem and scale

• Demand for animal protein is growing at an unprecedented rate, driven by population growth, rising incomes and urbanisation.
• Over the past 50 years, meat production has more than quadrupled, with the world producing more than 350 million tonnes of meat in 2022 compared to 71 million tonnes in 1961²
• In 2022, this equated to an estimated 75 billion chickens; 1.5 billion pigs; 515 million turkeys; 637 million sheep; 504 million goats; and 308 million cattle killed for meat production per annum²
• Chicken meat accounted for only 12 percent of global production in 1961. However, with its value undermined by commoditisation, its global share tripled, representing 35 percent of global production in 2022.
• Beef and buffalo meat nearly halved its share of global production in the same period (now accounting for around 21 percent), whilst pigmeat’s share remained constant at approximately 34 percent.
• In 2022, more than 92 billion animals were kept for food each year globally; 83 billion were slaughtered for meat, and 7.8 billion laying hens produced 1.65 trillion eggs, and 280 million dairy cows produced 730 billion liters of milk³.
• Regionally, Asia is the largest meat producer, accounting for around 40-45 percent of total meat production, largely driven by the production scale in China. Europe, and North and South America are also major producing regions.
• Most animals reared for food are kept in intensive systems.
• Intensive animal farming threatens several planetary boundaries, including climate change, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), land-system change, freshwater use, and the loss of biodiversity.
• Intensive livestock production is already responsible for 14.5% of global anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. Under a business-as-usual model of food production, in which meat and dairy consumption rises in line with a growing global population and rising GDPs, the agriculture sector alone would emit enough greenhouse gasses to take up the entire two degrees Celsius emissions budget by 2050⁴
• The intensification of crop production used for animal feed has accelerated land and soil degradation⁵
• Around one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction⁶, with intensive animal production a primary factor⁷. As meat consumption rises, so farmland expands depriving wildlife of their natural habitat and bringing them into dangerous proximity to human activity providing the perfect opportunity for pathogens to spread, some of which are zoonotic and pose a threat of pandemics.
• Every year there are around 600 million cases of foodborne diseases and 420,000 deaths⁸ predominantly from Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. Coli. In addition, agricultural intensification is associated with 50% of emerging zoonotic diseases since 1940.
• Intensive livestock systems have an enormous impact on the welfare of the billions of animals reared for our food each year.

What are the welfare issues associated with factory farming?

This section is taken from Jones 2017⁹.

Intensive farming relies on systems and practices that at the minimum level do not meet the needs of animals, do not provide animal choice, do not promote positive welfare experiences mentally or behaviourally and require modification of the animal to fit the animal to the surroundings rather than fitting the surroundings to the animal. The most obvious causes for concern are:

• Confinement. Examples of the most severe forms of confinement are cages for laying hens, rabbits, quail and even broiler chickens (in countries such as Russia, Turkey, China); sow stalls and farrowing crates; tethered systems for dairy cows; veal crates for calves. Confinement systems are associated with a lack of movement and opportunity to express even the most basic of behaviours, such as wing stretching and scratching (laying hens), sitting upright or hopping (rabbits), walking and turning around (sows), or having the comfort of one’s own kind (calves). Severe confinement leads to stereotypic behaviours, such as bar-biting and sham chewing, even depression (in sows), and is associated with muscular weakness.
• Overcrowding. High stocking densities and limited space allowance per animal in barns and pens, limit behaviour. Broiler chickens constantly bump into each other and disturb each other at commercial stocking densities¹⁰ are averse to sitting in such close proximity¹¹; sit in a compressed state¹²; and choose areas with more available space if given choice¹³. Animals such as pigs have barely enough room to lie down simultaneously near slaughter weight and are unable to create functional areas (separate feeding, drinking, resting and activity zones) in their pens.
• Barren environments. These are usually associated with fully or partially slatted systems indoors or with feedlots outdoors. A lack of stimulation and meaningful occupation leads to boredom and frustration in pigs and laying hens, contributing to damaging behaviours such as tail biting in pigs and aggression and feather pecking in laying hens. It also leads to stereotypic behaviours such as tongue rolling in cattle and over-mating in broiler breeders.
• Mutilations. A range of mutilations are commonly performed in commercial practice. These include: beak trimming of hens and turkeys; tail docking of pigs, dairy cattle and sheep; mulesing of sheep; dehorning or disbudding of cattle; castration of male pigs, cattle and sheep; and spaying of female pigs and cattle in some regions of the world. Most mutilations are performed without anaesthesia or analgesia and so involve short- and long-term pain, neuroma formation, and associated depression of appetite and behaviour modification.
• Breeding for high production traits. Livestock are selected for ever higher growth rates in meat animals, milk yields for dairy animals, litter sizes in pigs and egg yields for laying hens. Rate of growth in the modern broiler is directly linked to lethargy, poor walking ability¹⁴ and cardiac dysfunction¹⁵. It is also associated with severe feed restriction and chronic hunger in the parents of the meat chicken¹⁶. High production performance is correlated to high rates of lameness, mastitis and poor reproductive performance in dairy cows¹⁷, high rates of stillborn and low litter weights in pigs, and osteoporosis in laying hens.
• Transport. The concerns centre on handling stress during loading and unloading and space allocations that do not allow for normal standing postures or for animals to lie down without the risk of being trampled. The duration of transport (i.e. transport time itself) is also of concern because of animal hunger, thirst and fatigue, and the occurrence of deaths in transit.
• Slaughter. The concerns at slaughter centre on the provision of rest in lairage, handling stress to the point of slaughter, whether the animals are effectively stunned before slaughter, and the distress associated with the slaughter method.
• Animal health. The prevention of disease and maintenance of healthy animals is a major topic. One aspect of this is ensuring that farm animals are fit and healthy. In addition, there are important public health concerns linked to the way disease is prevented; examples include the overuse of antimicrobials in livestock production resulting in the development of antimicrobial resistance and the food safety impacts that result from food contamination with bacteria such as Salmonella, Campylobacter, and E. coli. Of increasing concern, is the risk of pandemics following zoonotic transmission of animal origin viruses¹⁸.
• Poor welfare outcomes. Physical conditions that impair welfare are increasingly being measured. Examples include the incidence of lameness and mastitis in dairy cows, feather loss due to feather pecking in laying hens, poor walking ability in broiler chickens, and the incidence of tail biting in pigs. To date, most indicators of welfare are associated with the physical condition and production of animals (such as growth rate and mortality), while measures of behaviour are still in development (for a further discussion, see¹⁹ and the work of the Animal Welfare Indicators project²⁰ Welfare Quality²¹ and the AssureWel project²²

Link to the relevant Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)

• SDG 15: Life on Land: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss³³