Any sustainable food system should allow animals to enjoy the widest range of natural behaviour possible, including access to the open air, natural diet and no routine dosing with medicines and other drugs.

Your plan should be to ensure that you buy meat and poultry from sources where all the animal welfare laws in your food chain are being followed and that there are competent people involved throughout.

Checks with your suppliers should cover the provision of feed and water, housing, sanitation, handling, catching and loading, transportation, and animal behavior.

A checklist would ensure that there is the following:

• comfort and shelter
• ready access to fresh water
• a diet to maintain the animals in full health and vigour
• an opportunity for reasonable movement
• company of other animals
• opportunity to exercise most normal patterns of behavior
• light of appropriate length and intensity
• flooring that neither harms the animals nor causes undue strain
• prevention, or rapid diagnosis and treatment, of abnormal behavior, injury, parasitic infestation, and disease
• freedom from stress
• emergency arrangements to cover outbreaks of fire, the breakdown of essential mechanical services, and the disruption of supplies
• no regular antibiotics/hormones

Possible Policy Statements

We aim to purchase meat and animal producuts from livestock that have been treated in a humane manner.

Suggested Indicators

Stall and tether free pigs.