The co-creator of an updated model for animal welfare shared his theories with a packed house in Leduc during Alberta Farm Animal Care’s annual conference on March 22.

Professor David Mellor, Foundation Director of the Animal Welfare Science and Bioethics Centre at Massey University in New Zealand, has challenged the Five Freedoms as the basis from which animal welfare is assessed and audited as too complex and restrictive.

The statement of Five Freedoms was first created and published in 1979 by the United Kingdom Farm Animal Welfare Council as a guideline for improving the welfare of domestic animals:

1. Freedom from hunger or thirst by providing ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigour.

2. Freedom from discomfort by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area.

3. Freedom from pain, injury or disease by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment. 4. Freedom to express (most) normal behaviour by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind.

5. Freedom from fear and distress by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.

The statement of Five Freedoms was originally published in two columns, with the second being a set of provisions to be included with each of the five, Mellor said in his presentation. For brevity’s sake, the provisions are not included as such in many of the thousands of instances in which the statement has been published, he said. That in itself is a problem, but the provisions make up the essence of the Five Freedoms as tool for improving animal welfare, he said.

“It was a really good first attempt, and it was more than a first attempt because it generated so many more good outcomes. It scoped the wider dimensions of animal welfare, it specified wide areas of welfare concern, it identified five targets for welfare improvement . . . and it detailed practical ways to meet these targets.”

The Five Freedoms drew attention to the need to understand, identify and minimize negative experiences and states, which have been the major focus of animal welfare science research since its creation, said Mellor.

The statement also has its weaknesses, he said. The Five Freedoms were originally proposed to mean that animals should be as free as possible from the ideals cited. However, over the years, people became increasingly dogmatic about what the statement means, to the point where they were viewed not as freedoms, but as rights.

They are impossible to achieve and do not provide a sound basis for animal welfare assessment, nor can they be used to grade welfare compromise, said Mellor.

“So, the Freedoms are problematic, but actually, the provisions are pretty good. They certainly need updating, but if you look at welfare codes across the world, they’re based on the provisions.”

Mellor listed a set of negative experiences, cited within the Five Freedoms paradigm, which are to be minimized because of their impact on the functional capacity of the body. They include breathlessness, thirst, hunger, pain, nausea, dizziness, debility, weakness and sickness.

Neutralizing these experiences in and of themselves does not produce positive welfare, said Mellor. “You can see how the notion of being completely free of these and other experiences is therefore biologically misleading and inaccurate,” he said. External factors can also affect an animal’s perception of its circumstances, which can be added as negative experiences. While the Five Freedoms addresses fear, additional external factors must also be considered, including those which produce anxiety, pain, frustration, anger, helplessness, loneliness, boredom and depression.

Animal welfare also means providing animals with positive experiences from their environment and through interaction with other animals, said Mellor.

Negative impacts must be near neutral for positive experiences to occur, he said.

“We have two good reasons for minimizing negative experiences and states. It’s unpleasant for the animals and we need to have them at tolerably low levels so they will engage in activities that they find rewarding when those opportunities are available.”

The Five Domains method, developed in the early 1990s by Mellor and a colleague, Cam Reid, was therefore offered not as a definition of animal welfare, but as a systematic means of assessing animal welfare, compromise and enhancement.

“Its initial focus was on the sources, types and grading of animal welfare compromise,” said Mellor.

It is structured around four physical or functional domains that are then tied in with the animal’s mental state as the fifth domain.

The first three domains of nutrition, environment and health are grouped as survival-related factors while the fourth, behaviour, is focused on situational factors. Each of the five domains includes a set of negative and positive conditions or experiences. For example, under mental state, a list of negative factors includes thirst, hunger, nausea, sickness, panic and pain while positive factors include taste pleasures, drinking pleasures, sexual gratification, physical comforts and engagement.

The animal’s welfare state can therefore be graded on the degree to which positive and negative factors exist within each of the five domains, as charted below. “Remember, there is always overlap between these. You can grade the positives in terms of the provisions of the opportunities and the extent to which those opportunities are utilized by the animals,” said Mellor.

He offered three recommendations for people when assessing the welfare of an animal or group of animals.

1. Avoid reference to the Five Freedoms to reduce misconceptions and confusion

2. Emphasize the provisions, but include both negatives and positives and update them.

3. Align each provision with a relevant animal aim to emphasize experiences that most affect the animals’ welfare.

“When you go back and you look at your animals and you look at the circumstances they’re in, think of one thing that you can probably do to make a difference that is practical, economic and therefore doable in your terms. It may be, if you’ve been feeding animals the same diet over and over and over again, thinking of ways you can perhaps give them some variety of diet, of foods that they would find enjoyable.”

Picking up from Mellor’s presentation, ethologist Yolande Seddon from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine spoke about options available to swine producers who have not yet made the switch to group housing in their sow barns.

Producers have a variety of designs and choices available to them, which will be based mainly upon the feeding system they choose, said Seddon.

The layout of the pens should provide areas where sows can rest that are separate from dunging and eating areas, she said. There should also be room for animals to escape or avoid dominant sows and, in larger groupings, spaces where small social groups can stay together. Foot injuries can be reduced and sow comfort can be improved by minimizing the spaces between floor slates and eliminating them altogether in resting areas, she said.

While there have been concerns that loose housing will require more space, some producers have succeeded in creating floor designs that have enabled them to run the same number of sows in the same amount of space, she said. WCVM is part of a national group housing study that is investigating various factors in loose housing of sows, including gilt development and various means of introducing new animals into a herd.

A web site has been created, including examples of conversions and new barns in various parts of the country. Producers are invited to visit www.groupsowhousing.com to learn more. •

— By Brenda Kossowan