Moving from routine to risk-based official controls in slaughterhouses: Development of a scoring tool for the risk of non-compliance with animal welfare regulations

Slaughter of animals is a necessary step of meat production process that takes place out of public view, but that is a subject of consumers' and civil society organisations’ concern. Public policies are progressing constantly to meet social expectations and optimize official controls in slaughterhouses. Regarding animal welfare, the main objective of official controls of food business operators (FBOs) is to ensure that animals are spared any avoidable pain, distress, or suffering during their killing and related operations. In this context of improving the efficiency of public action, the aim of this study was to develop a risk-based approach for the control of compliance with animal welfare regulations in red meat slaughterhouses. After a preliminary phase of data mapping, data qualitative assessment and expert knowledge elicitation, the statistical study was divided into four steps: (i) identification of risk factors associated with FBOs not being compliant with animal welfare requirements; (ii) development of a risk score formula to predict the risk of non-compliance with animal welfare regulations and assignment of a risk score to each process operating in a slaughterhouse; (iii) ranking of processes and slaughterhouses into different risk groups according to the score; (iv) validation of the model using data from the year 2020.