Sweden’s animal welfare laws continue to be strengthened – studies
Laws that protect the welfare of horses, cattle and pigs in Sweden have been strengthened in recent decades, researchers have found, even though the number of specific legal requirements has been eased.
Frida Lundmark Hedman, Charlotte Berg and Margareta Stéen, write in the newspaper Animal, reported 30 years of change in Sweden’s animal welfare legislation and looked at the current situation.
The trio, with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, noted that Sweden is often mentioned as a leading country in animal welfare and associated legislation.
They examined proposals for amendments to the Swedish welfare legislation between 1988 and 2019 regarding horses, cattle and pigs, including the written justifications, the written stakeholders’ answers and the actual amendments to the final provisions.
They used a selection of 77 legal requirements to assess whether the level of animal welfare was affected by these changes in legislation.
The results showed that the animal welfare requirements in the country for horses, cattle and pigs increased overall during the 30-year study period, but that several specific requirements had been eased to satisfy interests other than animal welfare.
“It was more difficult to determine whether animal welfare improved in practice during the same period, due to the lack of systematic evaluations of the implications of changing the regulatory framework,” they said.
Future evaluations are needed to evaluate the outcome of new laws and to monitor whether they serve their purpose in practice.
Sweden has demanded that animals be allowed to carry out their natural behavior since the Animal Welfare Act of 1988, including a mandate for summer grazing land for dairy cows and a ban on sows and battery cages for laying hens.
The latest Animal Welfare Act in Sweden, which was introduced in April 2019, further drives the animal welfare position. It says not only that animals should be allowed to express their natural behavior and be protected from unnecessary suffering, but also that good animal welfare should be ensured, animal welfare should be promoted and all animals should show respect.
Animal welfare legislation in Sweden is adopted at three levels. The Riksdag is responsible for the Animal Welfare Act, which sets out the overall goals and frameworks for animal welfare. The Government is responsible for the Animal Welfare Ordinance, which is also written in fairly general terms, while the Swedish Board of Agriculture is responsible for the national regulations on animal welfare.
The authors said that the latter has updated the animal welfare regulations for cattle, pigs and horses several times since 1988, with 20 updates for cattle, 16 for pigs and 11 for horses.
They noted that animal welfare regulations for horses were very tight in 1989, and horses were exempted from most of the existing animal husbandry and care requirements until 1993.
The requirements were extended in 1993 to cover horses, for example that horses must be kept clean, have daily attention and monitoring, have well-groomed hooves, have access to nutritious feed and have a dry and clean stable with a satisfactory indoor climate.
However, only horses bred and kept for “competition purposes” were covered by the regulations at that time, while the requirements for other horses were only intended as general advice. In 2003, the regulations were extended to all horses.
The most extensive changes regarding horses were made in 2007, when the Swedish Animal Welfare Agency introduced additional requirements to enable horses’ need for social contact, daily training in paddocks or similar areas, which limited the time horses could be tied in stalls, and prohibited the construction of new stables with tie sheds. .
In 2018, the Swedish Board of Agriculture revised the horse regulations more structurally than contextually to make them more goal-oriented and flexible and less detailed.
Since 1989, the number of animal welfare requirements for horses has increased from 4 to 50.
The authors noted that regulations tend to set the minimum level of animal welfare, not the best possible level. “So a change in the regulations may mean that one minimum requirement is replaced by another minimum requirement.”
They said that an improved level of protection does not necessarily mean better animal protection. “Although it can be assumed that many of the improvements in the regulations lead to better animal welfare in practice at farm level, the changes would need to be evaluated more systematically and in more detail to verify this correlation.”
They said that animal welfare regulations exist to protect animals, but changes are not based solely on new scientific findings concerning animal welfare per se.
“On the contrary, several other aspects, such as politics, economics, geographical land and climate constraints and the views of society, also affect legislation.”
According to its government mandate, in addition to striving for good animal welfare, the Swedish Board of Agriculture must also improve the competitiveness of Swedish farmers and enable increased Swedish food production. “Such directions will sometimes lead to the release of animal welfare regulations.”
Hedman, Berg and Stéen said that their study does not point to an ideal way to write or change legislation, nor does it identify an ideal level of animal welfare to be specified in legislation.
“The results can still serve as a useful tool for public or private decision-makers to improve the transparency of the comment process and reveal the delicate balance between different interests in this process.”
Lundmark Hedman, F .; Berg, C .; Stéen, M. Thirty years of change and the current situation for Swedish animal welfare legislation. Animals 2021, 11, 2901. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani11102901
The study, published under one Creative Commons License, can be read here.