Risk assessment in animal welfare - especially referring to animal transport

The increasing awareness of animal welfare in public and science induces a need for objective evaluation. Particularly animal welfare during transport is discussed due to the variable transport conditions in Europe. Therefore an objective evaluation of animal transport is relevant and the first attempts to develop animal welfare risk assessment guidelines for animal transport are made. A report of the development of a guideline on animal welfare risk assessment during animal transport (Dalla Villa et al., 2009) bases on other recent reports and guidelines of animal welfare risk assessment published by EFSA (2009) and adapts the method to animal transport condition. For the implementation of a model for quantitative risk assessment, transport conditions were defined to develop multiple scenarios. Hazard identification was prepared for each scenario and for three selected scenarios a complete risk assessment was performed. Within the exemplary risk assessment potential hazards were initially identified and furthermore hazard description and exposure assessment were evaluated by expert opinion which resulted in risk characterisation. Within risk characterisation of each hazard, magnitude and risk estimate were calculated to afford an individual ranking of these values in order to obtain a graphical illustration of the ten highest estimated risks.