GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

The aim of this grant procedure is to conclude with a direct agreement for the execution of specific tasks over a clearly defined period as outlined in this call for proposals.

The overall purpose of the call for proposals is to pilot a harmonised and large-scale collection of welfare data from sows and piglets across EU MSs for enabling future quantitative risk assessment of the welfare of sows and piglets on farm. This activity is divided in 2 main parts:

• to identify a set of (existing and, eventually, also new) ABMs and related context data used for assessing the welfare on farm of sows and piglets that can be collected in the field (on farm and, from culled sows, at slaughterhouses) on a large scale and in a harmonised way across several EU MSs, considering the different housing systems and practices, and
• to develop a freely accessible and online-based database that contains the information on the selected ABMs and related context data collected from sows and piglets directly from the field. Data collection will be done following a well-defined protocol implemented by trained field evaluators.

For this specific call, it is worth specifying that:

• the data collection should be organised considering, but not exclusively, the housing systems and practices, the highly relevant welfare consequences, the ABMs, including, for the sows, the ABMs for collection at slaughterhouses to monitor the level of welfare on farm, and the exposure variables (factors) identified and described in the EFSA 2022 Scientific Opinion on the welfare of pigs on farm (EFSA AHAW Panel, 2022);
• the welfare data to collect are on ABMs and the related management-, resource- and environmentbased (MB, RB, EB) data (so called ‘context data’) as defined in EFSA Guidance for Risk assessment in AW (EFSA AHAW Panel, 2012b22) and in the roadmap (Paulović et al., 2024).

The primary goal is to develop a freely accessible, online-based database and to assist EFSA in analysing correlations between ABMs and related contextual data, thereby enhancing EFSA’s capacity to respond to forthcoming inquiries from the European Commission, the European Parliament, or MSs.

Objective 1: Identify and select ABMs and related management-, resource- and environment-based context data for assessing on-farm welfare of sows and piglets.

Objective 2: Develop a prototype database populated with ABMs and context data collected from the field on a large scale across EU MSs following a protocol and testing its effectiveness.