📋 Tender Overview
Waitrose is rolling out a new mobile application that will help the retailer assess and begin to understand the emotional wellbeing of its farm animals. The first of its kind the app aims to manage and improve opportunities that animals have to experience a good and enriching life - a process that Waitrose hopes will help it lead further improvements to animal welfare standards across the UK.Developed by leading animal behavioural scientists at Scotlands Rural College SRUC and licensed by Waitrose for trial and development for two years the application is designed to help field teams better understand recognise and record emotionally expressive behaviour that - in part - contributes to an animals quality of life.Although the app itself is designed to be practical and easy to use on farm it is underpinned by rigorous scientific research which its creator Professor Francoise Wemelsfelder calls Qualitative Behavioural Assessment QBA. The method allows animal welfare inspectors to record different expressive qualities of behaviour through the app such as being relaxed tense playful or anxious - behaviours that are indicative of an animals emotional body language and possible signs of their general well-being. This will help field teams assessing Waitrose farms develop their skills and help them describe and quantify the different expressions they observe when looking at their animals. In turn this will help them better understand the mood the animals are experiencing while interacting with each other and their environment.Professor Wemelsfelder comments Good physical health is vital for good welfare but there is clear consensus among the scientific animal welfare community that factors such as enjoyment contentment and positive excitement play an equally vital role in ensuring that an animal has a good life. QBA not only provides a way to assess these factors it also opens up the conversation about what positive emotional wellbeing for an animal truly looks like. Because we believe fundamentally that animals are not simply production systems to be managed. They are sentient creatures that must be cared for.While this remains very much in development the fact that the app will be trialled and developed at scale with a leading supermarket chain is an incredibly significant and positive step for the industry.James Bailey Executive Director at Waitrose comments This is a huge development for the industry as it is the first time any retailer has explored welfare measures based on the concept of an animals freedom to express positive emotions. In some countries farm animals continue to be looked upon as food production systems that need to be managed. This is wrong and for the UK to continue its position as a leader in farming standards its critical that we recognise farm animals as sentient creatures capable of experiencing a range of emotions and positive experiences. By acknowledging this working hard to understand what those positive emotional expressions are and how they can be unlocked we can lead the industry into a new and more confident era of farm animal welfare.The app will bolster a breadth of existing animal welfare measurements that Waitrose has incorporated for decades including good health good feed and good housing and is part of the larger Good Life animal welfare initiative that has been pioneered by Waitrose and its suppliers. The project forms one part of Waitroses new 10 year agriculture strategy which - among other ambitions - sets out to give animals good and enriching lives pay farmers fairly ensure all raw materials are responsibly sourced and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all UK farms and fisheries. Field teams refer to on farm managers external auditors that will independently assess a farm against a number of factors including animal welfare.Experienced assessors and farmers who work with animals every day will have already acquired a lot of this understanding over the years and the app wants to support and build on that.HOW THE QBA APP WORKS1. Creating a bespoke behavioural language A bespoke version of the app has been developed for the six species groups that QBA will roll out to initially - including dairy cows veal calves pigs laying hens broiler chickens and ducks. Note This project is still in its infancy but it will be added to further supply chains in the coming year. In addition more functions will be built in the future - for example for farmers to track the emotional well-being of their animals over time in different areas of farm management. Although some descriptive terms for animal emotion such as relaxed or content are commonly used across the industry others can vary considerably depending on the species. . Farmers and field staff from the different supply chains have therefore been working together to come up with their own specific terms for describing emotions in the species they are working with.2. Identifying a pattern to assessA tool was needed eventually leading to the creation of the QBA app to enable assessors to score these terms and then integrate these terms into a larger pattern that helps us to assess the animals quality of life.In this respect QBA does not look at separate terms it always looks at the larger pattern of emotional expressivity that can be observed in and among the animals in a group.3. Using the appThe app which is available on iOS and Android provides farmers and field staff with a list of around 20 key descriptive terms bespoke to each species as stated aboveThe field manager farm assessor will observe the animals in front of them and score those animals on the individual terms that have been created for that specific species.
