Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The Animal Welfare Act (2018:1192) and the Animal Protection Ordinance (2019:66) includes all animals held by humans. Today, most animals have supplementary species-specific regulations in the animal welfare legislation. These regulations are important in the aspect of controlling that the animal welfare legislation is complied with, as well as checking that satisfactory animal welfare is maintained for the species concerned. Regulations support controlling authorities to provide standardized welfare protocols. Furthermore, the regulations support the keeper to understand and adjust their husbandry of the animals concerned. Despite this, alpacas have no regulations of their own. They are included in regulations about keeping animals in zoos and regulations about keeping animals in circuses, but this type of regulations cannot be applied to alpacas that are kept for production or hobby purposes.
The aim of this study was to investigate how alpaca management is performed in Sweden regarding herd size and purpose of housing. Furthermore, how keepers of alpaca thinks about the current Swedish animal welfare legislation, and how their knowledge and experiences about this may correspond to animal welfare. In addition to this, the knowledge level of the alpaca owners regarding Swedish legislation was examined. To investigate this, a questionnaire study was performed with both compulsory questions, as well as supplementary questions. The questionnaire was distributed via two Facebook groups and 70 email addresses that were registered as contacts at facilities that kept alpacas. A small sample size was obtained, however, the results indicated that the common herd size was small, with less than 5 individuals. Most of the keepers held their alpacas for hobby purposes. The majority of the ones that held them for production purposes were holding them for their wool. Only a small percentage would consider to sell meat from alpaca. The knowledge of Swedish animal legislation was low, where a few referred correctly to relevant legislation. The majority of alpaca keepers thought there should be species-specific regulations, and that alpaca should have one regulation with two definitions in it, both as a pet animal and as a production animal. The most difficult part of holding alpaca was how to care for old or sick animals, according to the keepers. The desire for better regulations concerning holding alpacas was seen in several categories, but the one with most answers was the same as in the previous question, which was old/sick animals.