INTRODUCTION
Animal Health and Welfare Management Programmes were introduced by the Scottish Executive to support the wider development of a more proactive approach to animal health and welfare across the Scottish livestock industry. Management Programmes promote the consistent improvement of animal health and welfare standards and support the production of quality livestock produce and improved farm business profitability. This helps to deliver the vision set out in the Animal Health and Welfare Strategy for Great Britain.
As a claimant under the Management Programmes, your client will have in place an Animal Health and Welfare Management Plan that is annually reviewed with your practice. The purpose of these plans is to identify current disease and welfare issues and to assess the risk of incursion of new diseases onto the client's farm. This allows your client, working with your practice and others, to prevent, control, mitigate or eradicate conditions such as mastitis, pneumonia and lameness. The Plan can also help your client, in discussion with your practice, to make decisions relating to the eradication of economically important diseases such as BVD and Johnes.
Monitoring the occurrence of health and welfare problems on-farm is a fundamental part of taking a proactive approach. The Benchmarking option is one of several voluntary options within your client's Animal Health and Welfare Management Programme. This is the first scheme providing farmers with Government support to facilitate a basic level of data recording and also provides your practice with a tool to analyse this information so that it can be better used to inform on-farm management decisions on animal health and welfare. Use of the national Benchmarking database will also give all of us a better understanding of national disease priorities, enabling targeted research into livestock health and welfare issues and a focussed approach towards dealing with national issues.