Farm animal transportation regulations: Time for a change?  

Year: 2022

Eugénie Duval 
University of British Columbia, Canada 

Research, Travel & Training Grant - £6,443

Live transport is a stressful experience for farm animals and well-identified risk factors such as fitness for transport, journey duration, climatic conditions, and space allowance can increase the negative impact of transportation. Concerns about the welfare of farm animals being transported are not new and jurisdictions around the world are under increased pressure to adopt more protective regulations. Strong discrepancies across different jurisdictions exist. Some have not – or only marginally – updated their animal transport regulations, whereas others have made substantive changes (e.g. Canada) or are in the process of updating their regulations (e.g. the EU, the UK). Here, we aim to provide the first comprehensive evaluation – fitness check – of live animal transport regulations applied to five English-speaking Western jurisdictions (Australia, Canada, New-Zealand, the US, and the EU). We carried out systematic comparisons, targeting how these different jurisdictions addressed four key animal welfare challenges identified using the available scientific literature. Our results show that all jurisdictions, including the most recent ones, fall short in guarantying adequate protection of livestock during transport. Some regulations stay silent on key issues (e.g. the US has no mention of adequate environmental temperatures during transport), or use vague language (e.g., “take reasonable steps to minimize the impact of extreme weather conditions on the welfare of livestock” in Australia), meaning that the issue is unlikely to be properly addressed. Others are more specific but do not reflect the latest scientific evidence (e.g. the EU have a max temperature of 30 +/- 5°C). Based on our analysis, we propose six recommendations to address the most pressing animal welfare concerns: 1) Define fitness for transport and explicitly ban transport of unfit animals; 2) Adopt a specific regime for compromised and vulnerable animals; 3) Adopt reduced absolute maximum journey durations; 4) Ban live animal export to countries with lower standards; 5) Adopt minimum and maximum temperatures inside vehicles; 6) Adopt species-specific minimum space allowances. If implemented, these propositions could dramatically improve the welfare of farm animals when subjected to live-animal transportation and contribute to make the livestock industry more sustainable.  

This study was published in Royal Society Open Science