Welfare quality® principles and criteria

This chapter outlines the science behind the development of the Welfare QualityR assessment systems. We concentrate on the animal welfare science and social science discussions upon which the welfare principles and criteria developed in the project are based, rather than on the actual assessment measures and their integration which are detailed in Chapters 6 and 7, although examples of measures are given to illustrate some of the issues that arose during the above process (Forkman, 2009; Keeling, 2009). From its inception the Welfare QualityR project was committed to developing a new way of assessing farm animal welfare that was both scientifically rigorous and reflected broader public concerns. Within the project social scientists worked alongside animal scientists in order to gain a deeper and more broad-based understanding of societal concerns about farm animal welfare and to help foster science-society dialogue around these issues based on fact rather than supposition (Miele et al., 2011). In some ways this was fairly straightforward, for example a societal concern about injuries to farm animals can be easily matched to the definitions of animal welfare prevalent among scientists. However, in other ways this dialogue was quite challenging because it raised fundamental questions not only concerning what constitutes 'farm animal welfare' but also about the nature and relevance of dialogues between experts and members of the public around these kinds of issues. For example, how can we foster a constructive dialogue between groups with very different levels of perception, understanding, experience and expertise? How also can we take into account the opinions of nonexperts within the increasingly technical fields of modern farming and farm animal welfare?.