RABDF has issued the following response to AHDB’s consultation on the proposed formation of an industry Ruminant Health & Welfare Group to deliver a simpler, more co-ordinated approach to tackling ruminant health and welfare across the UK. Details of the proposal can be found here.
The Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers (RABDF) is broadly supportive of the principles behind this proposal, particularly the need to achieve better outcomes for ruminant health and welfare in the UK. However, we do wonder whether these could not be achieved through the current CHAWG and SHAWG mechanisms. The new group will be very large and, in our view, pretty unwieldy and therefore much harder to reach consensus.
This is the crux of the problem in that there is insufficient detail in the proposal to explain how the new group will achieve its objectives over and above the current CHAWG and SHAWG. If given these extra responsibilities there is no reason why the current cattle and sheep groups cannot deliver specified outcomes more efficiently than the large cumbersome group proposed.
The proposed membership of the Ruminant Health and Welfare Group is too large whilst there are significant omissions such as Red Tractor and trade bodies such as Dairy UK.
It is not clear how this new “super group” will work with the various initiatives many of which are government funded nor how it will interact with the much talked about Animal Health Pathway which is an England only activity.
So, to summarise, RABDF, as a UK wide membership organisation, is pleased that AHDB are taking such a proactive approach to ruminant health and welfare but fail to see how this vastly expanded group will actually improve the situation. For example, it is difficult to see the sheep sector being interested in the CHAWG Dairy Cow Welfare Strategy, which proved so effective in the recent Food and Veterinary Office of the European Commission visit to various selected Member States, giving the UK a completely “clean bill of health”.