Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

To ensure proper animal welfare in Sweden, the county administration boards (CABs) serve an
important role through enforcing regulation and performing inspections. Resources need to be
divided on both routine and complaint inspections in a way that generates the most benefit. This
means avoiding placing said resources on inspections that are deemed unnecessary. This study was
performed to assist the CAB in Jönköping in prioritising complaints through finding potential
patterns between complaints and whether they were legitimate or not. From the Jönköping CAB
126 complaints along with respective inspection reports were gathered, all of which had led to a
physical inspection in 2024. These were organised and points of interest such as level of detail,
kind of animal, number of animals and anonymity was compared to outcome. The results showed
no concrete connections based on individual parameters, but that individual factors such as
specific animal species, are more common in specifically legitimate or illegitimate reports. The
number of anonymous complaints (in percentage) was about the same regardless of outcome,
which indicates that anonymity most likely is not an indicator of any specific outcome. Why
complaints were deemed illegitimate in their report was also investigated. It was found that a
minority of the illegitimate reports were entirely unfounded, while the majority had some form of
justifiability or that no actual control and/or inspection could be performed. This points a spotlight
on those illegitimate reports includes complaints both justified and not.