Explain briefly the main frameworks currently used to determine animal welfare requirements.

Frameworks used to determine animal welfare requirements

There are many characteristics we should be ruminated when trying to understand animal welfare. This can become very difficult, potentially with a need to balance diverse features which may be conflicting. To help address this difficulty many extensive frameworks have been suggested to help define more clearly what essential properties should be involved in an understanding of animal safety. They include:

1.      Five freedoms

2.      Five domains

3.      Welfare quality measures and ethics

 

1.      Five freedoms

The Five Freedoms initiated as an idea in the United Kingdom by the Farm Animal Welfare Board in 1979 and was originally dedicated to farm animals, although the perceptions and concepts apply usually to all animals. The Five Freedoms are:

·       Freedom from hunger and thirstiness – by organized access to water and food to preserve full healthiness & vigour.

·           Freedom from uneasiness – by providing a suitable atmosphere.

·           Freedom from ache, damage and disease – by prevention or quick diagnosis.

·       Freedom to show ordinary behaviour – by providing space, conveniences and company of species own kind.

·   Freedom from fear and distress – by confirming surroundings and treatment to avoid psychological distress.

The Freedoms identify the five main areas of animal safety concern and are in two parts:

·         The Freedom itself.

·         Its facility is how freedom must be accomplished.

The Five Freedoms cover phases of all three of the key animal welfare domains by giving aspects of:

·         Biological coping or working (e.g. freedom from sickness or malnourishment)

·         Normal living (e.g. freedom to show usual behaviour), and

·         Animal feelings (e.g. freedom from starvation, thirstiness, ache, discomfort, fear, suffering).

2.      Five Domains

The Five Domains model was considered to evaluate animal welfare compromise carried about through the use of animals in study and teaching. The Five Domains model shares several features in public with the Five freedoms but splits animal welfare into five ‘domains’- four of these concern physical or functional phases of an animal (Nutrition, Environment, Health, Behaviour, while the fifth domain is the animal’s mental state resulting from the assessment of where the animal is situated in four physical areas.

Recently the five domains model has been restructured and revised to take in aspects of positive welfare and quality of life opinions by adding:

·         Possible positive welfares to the animal in the diverse physical/efficient domains (e.g. chance to eat a varied diet in the nutrition domain).

·         Positive sensitive states to the psychological state domains (e.g. pleasure allied with different tastes).

3.      Welfare Quality Criteria and Principles

The most recent agenda for animal welfare assessment, or to deliver a complete overview of animal welfare is that established as part of a large European plan, ‘Welfare Quality, between 2004 & 2009. This effort aimed to progress methods to assess the welfare of farmed poultry, pigs and cattle. As part of this work the project established a set of four ideologies for moral animal welfare:

·         Good feeding

·         Good housing or environment

·         Good health

·         Suitable behaviour

They are again very comparable to the inventive concepts and aspects of welfare that were well-defined in the five freedoms. The purpose of the Welfare Quality work was to ‘operationalise’ the five freedoms by making it promising to conduct a sequence of actions, on-farm to reach an outline of the welfare state of farm animals.