Farm Animal Welfare Council 2009. Farm Animal Welfare in Great Britain: Past, Present and Future. Farm Animal Welfare Council, London, UK.

The Council has examined the effectiveness of British policy on farm animal welfare since 1965 and sets out a strategy that will lead to steady improvements in welfare over the next 20 years. Proposals are made for Government and commercial policies that will realise this aim. We have considered the ethical basis for the humane treatment of farmed animals and would wish to see identical standards applied to both home-grown and imported produce, difficult though the latter aspiration might be. We recommend that the current focus of policy moves beyond the absence of cruelty and unnecessary suffering - necessary as this is ? and a duty to provide for an animals needs, to ensuring an acceptable quality of life over an animals lifetime. ..... There have been many attempts to define animal welfare. A description adopted by the OIE7 in May 2008 is that "animal welfare means how an animal is coping with the conditions in which it lives. An animal is in a good state of welfare if (as indicated by scientific evidence) it is healthy, comfortable, well nourished, safe, able to express innate behaviour, and if it is not suffering from unpleasant states such as pain, fear and distress. Good animal welfare requires disease prevention and veterinary treatment, appropriate shelter, management, nutrition, humane handling and humane slaughter/killing. Animal welfare refers to the state of the animal; the treatment that an animal receives is covered by other terms such as animal care, animal husbandry and humane treatment" [p 3]. Normal behaviour is "behaviour that would usually be observed in healthy animals" [p 52].