The Welfare Quality Network is a collaborative effort of a large group of former partners of the Welfare Quality® project. The importance of retaining the collaboration and expertise established in the Welfare Quality® project has been highlighted in numerous official communications, like below ‘The Welfare Quality Story’.
This Network builds on that legacy by maintaining the scientific foundations and tools developed under the original project. It supports ongoing work through assessment protocols, training programs like Pigs Training, and independent certification schemes such as Welfair.
Through its Reports library, the Network provides access to technical reports, methodological studies, and validated indicators for auditors, producers, researchers, and policy makers, ensuring that welfare assessments remain science-based, comparable, and focused on continuous improvement.
Activities envisaged here include: advisory services; specific training and support to help farmer organizations or farmer–retailer groups; quality assurance checks to ensure correct use of the system; etc. Continued research and development aimed at extending and refining the Welfare Quality® assessment system for application in other species will also stimulate its adoption. Maintenance and upgrading of the Information Resource on practical welfare improvement strategies will also play an important role in this respect (see below).
Welfare Quality® established a website to provide information on the progress made in the project, its results and outputs. This website will be maintained by the Welfare Quality Network in order to continue the dissemination of information on animal welfare and its assessment, as well as on the application of practical welfare improvement strategies.
The Welfare Quality® protocols were published at the end of the project and were extremely well received. The protocols have only been published in English so far, but the Welfare Quality Network is available to support translations into other major languages and to check their correctness and quality. It will also be necessary to regularly publish and disseminate new releases of the protocols.
The existing Welfare Quality® assessment protocols and evaluation models need to be regularly updated and refined on the basis of new scientific findings, societal developments, and practical experiences gained during implementation. For example, some new measures may prove easier to collect, or they may be more precise or more reliable than those contained in the current Welfare Quality® protocols.
The Welfare Quality Network can provide the necessary expertise for the stringent testing of validity, repeatability, and robustness of a new measure, as well as the necessary process to translate the data into a value score.
The provision of sound advice on ways of avoiding welfare risks or resolving problems is critical for the uptake and implementation of the Welfare Quality® assessment systems and for improving farm animal welfare in general. Remedial measures developed within and outside the Welfare Quality® project are described in a Technical Information Resource, which also details the causes and consequences of welfare problems. The Welfare Quality Network can maintain, update (as new results emerge), extend (to include new strategies and new species), and disseminate this resource.
The active participation of a broad range of stakeholders (farmers, breeders, retailers, certification bodies, NGOs, national governments, etc.) in both research and in an advisory capacity greatly facilitated the uptake of Welfare Quality® outcomes and helped to guide the development of follow-on projects. Through collaborative ventures with, for instance, the European Animal Welfare Platform, a multi-stakeholder project committed to safeguarding and advancing farm animal welfare, the partners in the Welfare Quality Network aim to promote further stakeholder involvement.
Through experience gained during the management of the systems and the efforts to support implementation, areas requiring further research are expected to be highlighted. Such areas may include: fundamental biological knowledge required to assess, safeguard, and improve all aspects of animal welfare, as well as relevant developments in stakeholder or consumer attitudes, areas of cross-compliance, and social, economic, and environmental policy. A prioritization of such R&D needs would be helpful for a range of EU and national research funding bodies.