Risk assessment in animal welfare : EFSA approach

Animal Welfare (AW) issues are becoming an increasing concern for food-producing and laboratory animals. Risk Assessment (RA) is usually used to describe and quantify the risk of introduction of infections, toxiinfections or residues coming from veterinary medicines, by importing live animals and their products or to identify options for the control of epidemic or endemic diseases. Recently, RA methods have been sought to be applied to AW as well. However, considering that this is a newly emerging area, for which no general guidelines have been produced, the above mentioned RAs cannot be always directly transferred. The use of a RA approach to evaluate issues related to AW can be useful to better identify and rank welfare risk factors, and to prioritise possible management measures. Possible approaches to AW RA are described and differences and similarities with the classical RA are discussed as well as the problems identified concerning the use of RA methodology for AW. A significant difficulty in AW RA consists in the quantification of the severity and of the probability of exposure of the identified hazards to welfare. Furthermore, data from different expert opinions are not always expressed using the same scale. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has launched RA studies in which AW was considered as endpoint of interest. Examples are briefly discussed