Perform Your Own Animal Welfare Self-assessment

The BroilerNet project involves a bottom-up approach to identify challenges and innovation needs for broiler farmers in Europe, and to collect promising and already successfully implemented Good Practices to meet the challenges in questions. The top Good Practices selected by experts within the three thematic areas (animal health management, animal welfare and sustainability) have been summarized in factsheets.

Assessing the welfare of poultry on the farm is often a challenge, as many indicators have to be recorded simultaneously in order to obtain a true picture of the flock. The free mobile application EBENE® is conducted on a sample of animals (broilers, laying hens, turkeys, quails and guinea fowl) at the end of the batch, during the week preceding slaughter, and for sexed batches, before or after the removal of females. It allows the farmer to observe and validate the long-term improvements made and to check their effectiveness. Farmers spend more time observing their animals, increasing awareness and enabling them to recognize the first signs of distress more quickly and effectively, leading to better adjustments in their practices. A testimonial note that the audit encourages the farmer to observe the animals' behaviour more than they usually would: "I don't take the time every day to really watch them in detail.“ The entire evaluation takes about 1 hour and 15 minutes for the complete version and 25 minutes for the simplified version, conducted once a year per poultry house.