Assessing opportunities to improve the efficiency of the WQ broiler protocol

The time-consuming character of the existing Welfare Quality protocols is currently a major hindrance in their routine implementation. In December 2013 a new project initiated by the Belgian federal government will start, assessing the possibility to monitor the welfare of broiler chickens in a more efficient way. In this project, we will investigate if the Welfare Quality protocol can be replaced partially by information that is currently routinely collected for other purposes (e.g., by government inspectors, certification bodies, sales representatives, poultry farmers, transporters, slaughterhouses and hatcheries). We will evaluate which (if any) parts of the protocol can be replaced based on correlations between the Welfare Quality scores and the routinely collected data, and calculate how much time this would save compared to a full Welfare Quality assessment. We will also evaluate if the routinely collected data can serve as an ‘alarm’ that allows more targeted audits of at-risk farms using the Welfare Quality protocol. In addition to the correlations between the Welfare Quality parameters and the routinely collected data, we will also study correlations amongst the Welfare Quality parameters, and the strength of the association between the Welfare Quality indicators and certain management procedures.