Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK.
Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2023 Mar 29;290(1995):20230120. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.0120. Epub 2023 Mar 22.
Animal welfare is usually excluded from life cycle assessments (LCAs) of farming systems because of limited consensus on how to measure it. Here, we constructed several LCA-compatible animal-welfare metrics and applied them to data we collected from 74 diverse breed-to-finish systems responsible for 5% of UK pig production. Some aspects of metric construction will always be subjective, such as how different aspects of welfare are aggregated, and what determines poor versus good welfare. We tested the sensitivity of individual farm rankings, and rankings of those same farms grouped by label type (memberships of quality-assurance schemes or product labelling), to a broad range of approaches to metric construction. We found farms with the same label types clustered together in rankings regardless of metric choice, and there was broad agreement across metrics on the rankings of individual farms. We found woodland and systems typically perform better than those with no labelling and labelling, and that outdoor-bred and outdoor-finished systems perform better than indoor-bred and slatted-finished systems, respectively. We conclude that if our goal is to identify relatively better and worse farming systems for animal welfare, exactly how LCA welfare metrics are constructed may be less important than commonly perceived.
动物福利通常被排除在农业系统的生命周期评估 (LCA) 之外，因为对于如何衡量动物福利，尚未达成共识。在这里，我们构建了几个与 LCA 兼容的动物福利指标，并将其应用于我们从负责英国 5%猪肉生产的 74 个不同品种到完成系统收集的数据中。指标构建的某些方面将始终具有主观性，例如如何对福利的不同方面进行汇总，以及如何确定较差的福利与良好的福利。我们测试了个别农场排名以及按标签类型（质量保证计划的成员资格或产品标签）分组的相同农场的排名对指标构建的各种方法的敏感性。我们发现，无论选择哪种指标，具有相同标签类型的农场都会聚集在排名中，并且不同指标对个别农场的排名有广泛的共识。我们发现，林地和系统的表现通常优于没有标签和标签的系统，而户外饲养和户外育肥的系统的表现分别优于室内饲养和条板育肥的系统。我们得出的结论是，如果我们的目标是确定在动物福利方面相对较好和较差的农业系统，那么构建 LCA 福利指标的具体方式可能不如人们普遍认为的那么重要。
