Animal welfare at slaughter in Member States : overview report

This overview report is on a series of 13 audits by the Food and Veterinary Office on the official controls and other measures taken by Competent Authorities to implement Council Regulation (EC) No 1099/2009 (hereafter "the Regulation"). The objective of the audits was to evaluate the effectiveness of official controls on business operators to ensure animals are spared any avoidable pain, distress, or suffering during their killing and related operations as required by the Regulation. The overview report concludes that changes made by food business operators in response to their new responsibilities have been more successful in improving animal welfare where guides to good practice were available and where official controls were adapted to focus on operator's procedures and records. Official controls have an active role in improving the compliance of food business operator's procedures and activities as evidenced by the fact that gaps found in operator's procedures occurred mostly where an audit approach had not been adopted as part of official controls. As observed for waterbath stunning of poultry, official controls based on assessment of specific risk factors linked to animal welfare and good reporting systems allow competent authorities to target their controls better and to improve operator's compliance in a difficult area. The availability of guides to good practice in the specific sector also plays an important role in achieving compliance. There are wide variations in the way Member States have operated the derogation for slaughter without stunning, as the Regulation allows flexibility for Member States to decide the level of the Competent Authority which grants the derogation and how such operations are subsequently administered. The correlation between the FVO desk study and audits indicates that authorities with better documented control procedures (i.e. The Netherlands and Poland) had a better level of preparedness which translated into better compliance by food business operators. The report makes recommendations to all Member States as a result of the lessons learned from the most common and significant non-compliances seen and makes suggestions which could help implement best practices for controls of Council Regulation (EC) No 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing and thus improve the welfare of animals.