Welfare principles and criteria

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Measures to check welfare criteria

Whenever possible, the final Welfare Quality® assessment measures have been evaluated with respect to their validity (does the measure reflect some aspect of the actual welfare of animals), reliability (acceptable inter or intra observer repeatability and robustness to external factors, e.g. time of day or weather conditions) and their feasibility. A further important aspect of this data collection is that value judgements are minimized, i.e. the assessor counts or classifies animals according to a simple series of categories illustrated by pictures or video clips. Hence measures in the protocols do not require veterinary diagnostic expertise or specialist animal behaviour knowledge to be accurately recorded. Some measures which were initially proposed did not meet these conditions and were dropped from the scheme early in the evaluation process, whereas other measures have been accepted in anticipation of further improvements and refinements. This latter concession is because at least one measure per criterion is needed to assess overall animal welfare. For some criteria, it has been necessary to include resource- and/or management-based measures because no animal-based measure was sufficiently sensitive or satisfying in terms of validity, reliability, or feasibility.

NOTE It is important to remember that research is continuing to identify new and better measures and that Welfare Quality® protocols will be updated in the light of new knowledge.


Calculation of scores

General principles


The protocols can be downloaded from The Welfare Quality Network website.
http://www.welfarequality.net/en-us/news/assessment-protocols.


The new versions of the protocols mention precisely the coefficients to be used in formula to calculate spline function. The protocol for veal calves has not been updated. Click here to obtain the exact coefficients for :

Veal calves


Some typing errors were found in the previous versions of the files above. The files have been corrected on march 22, 2016