Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Animal welfare in Sweden has gone through major changes during the later years. In 2004, Swedish Animal Welfare Agency took over the central responsibility for the animal welfare from the Swedish Board of Agriculture, and in 2007 the board again became the central authority for animal welfare in Sweden.Even the practical supervision has changed, from the 1 of January 2009 the supervision is to be performed by the county administrative boards, instead of by the individual municipalities.

Since 2006 every horse in the European Union has to have an identification card, in Sweden called a “horse passport” which describes the color and markings of the horse as well as any veterinary treatments.The ELOF-project, a collaborative project between the Swedish Board of Agriculture and the county administrative boards, intends to make the animal welfare supervision effective, standardised, fair and risk-based. Because of the takeover of the supervision and of the ELOF-project the Örebro County Administrative Board has began to make an inventory of the number of horses and horsefarms in the county. Another Ethology and Animal Welfare-student and I did, in collaboration with the county administrative board created a checklist that in connection with the inventory will lead to a risk-based animal welfare supervision. Apart from number of horses at each farm, the checklist brings up subjects as number of horses per enclosure, condition of the horses, lameness or other injuries, type and condition of fences, use of barbed wire in fences, pasture surface condition, access to shelter from wind and the general impressions of the farm according to risk factors as for example garbage outside the enclosed pasture.

Two paragraphs soon to be enforced, the horse´s right to perform its social behaviour, preferably through contacts with other horses (applied fromAugust 1, 2009) and the ban of barbed wire in pasture enclosures for horses (applied from January 1, 2010) make these issues important to consider in the checklist.

The inventory was performed in the munincipality of Degerfors, one of several munincipalities where the county administrative board felt it had insufficient knowledge of the number of horses. Using control list, car, maps and GPS-navigator the inventory took place during a few weeks weeks in March and April 2009. During the inventory we also had access to a property register, the map system Kartogis and an already existing animal keeper register.