Do Animal Welfare Schemes Promote Better Animal Health? An Empirical Investigation of German Pork Production

Abstract

Animal welfare programs support lower production intensity and environmental enrichment to create additional value for animals and consumers, by facilitating farms to resolve the conflict between animal welfare and efficient farming. Yet, the success of such enrichments in improving animal welfare and thus the productive performance depends on farmers’ production process management. Complexity of animal welfare, and its unclear role for the hog finishing process’ performance, challenges the evaluation of animal welfare programs. Using unique farm-level data comprising cost accounting and production economic data, participation status in the German program “Initiative Tierwohl” and animal health scores collected at the abattoir, we investigate the relationship between farm performance, animal health and program participation. This study relies on relative farm performance measures of technical and cost efficiency, obtained by nonparametric data envelopment analysis. Statistical correlation analysis and distribution difference testing was supported by locally estimated scatterplot smoothing. The findings indicate the possibility for high farm performance with low prevalence rates of internal organ alterations, also for non-participants. Program participants, however, achieved better relative farm performance and higher levels of respiratory health scores. Based on the indications from abattoir data, no statistically significant relationship between animal health and farm performance, and no moderating role of the program could be found for the sampled farms. We conclude that low threshold programs, such as the “Initiative Tierwohl”, might provide an incentive for adjusting the environment and can thus contribute to increasing sustainability in pork production.