Does the Implementation of an Animal Welfare Programme on a Farm Yield a Demonstrable Improvement in Fattening Pig Welfare?

Simple Summary Due to social criticism of livestock farming, the "Initiative Animal Welfare" was founded in Germany to improve the conditions in which pigs are kept. At the same time, farmers were obliged to monitor animal welfare parameters which could be recorded directly on the animal, e.g., in the form of tail and ear lesions. Furthermore, there are resource-related animal welfare parameters, e.g., the water flow rate of the drinking troughs, which are to be measured. The aim of this study was to apply animal welfare parameters on farms and compare farms participating in the "Initiative Animal Welfare" with those not participating. The collected data was used to calculate the risk indicated by an animal welfare parameter deviating from the optimum. In addition, an overall score for the farms was calculated from the different animal welfare parameters recorded. It was found that the animal welfare farms did not perform better in terms of both the overall score and the risk of not finding a parameter in the optimum range. One reason for this may be that the farms worked at a very high level in both types of husbandry and thus the improvement in husbandry conditions in the farms with better animal welfare conditions was not measurable. In the course of social criticism of fattening pig farming, an animal welfare programme called "Initiative Animal Welfare" (ITW) was founded to increase animal welfare in pig farming in Germany. Furthermore, there is a legal obligation to record animal welfare parameters as a self-monitoring measure. The "German Association for Technology and Structures in Agriculture" published a guideline on the applicable animal welfare criteria. This guide formed the basis of this study's data collection. The aim was to apply the animal welfare parameters on farms by comparing the results between farms participating in ITW with those not participating. A cumulative score was calculated by evaluating the collected data. In addition, the relative risk was calculated in order to estimate the risk of finding a negative expression of a parameter. Our data show that ITW farms did not perform significantly better than the farms without ITW in terms of both the cumulative score and the relative risk. Overall, it must be considered that in both farm variants the occurrence of negative evaluations was very rare and the visited farms thus certainly can be considered to be well-managed farms. Climate parameters were recorded in each compartment and showed no significant differences in most cases.