About the AWAG

The Animal Welfare Assessment Grid (AWAG) is an cloud-based online tool, designed to assess and monitor the welfare and cumulative lifetime experience of animals. The AWAG tool encompasses the five welfare needs across these four parameters below:

• Physical: assesses an animal’s clinical health including factors such as body condition, illness and injury.
• Behavioural/Psychological: assesses an animal’s mental wellbeing and includes factors such as response to stressors and how often these are encountered.
• Environmental: assesses the animal’s environment and does it facilitate enrichment provision, opportunities to interact with others, choice and comfort.
• Procedural: assesses how the animal responds to clinical and husbandry events, and includes factors such as handling, change in routine, and pain of the procedure.

The AWAG is unique in that is considers the lifetime experience of the individual animal, and the ‘cumulative suffering’ that can have an impact on quality of life.

The Grid examines the welfare of the animal at key points throughout its life taking into account the duration as well as the intensity of any impacts on welfare and produces both numeric and visual presentation of the cumulative effects and the animal’s overall quality of life.  By scoring the four parameters (Physical, Psychological, Environmental, Procedural), this system develops a grid using data collected as an intrinsic part of husbandry and veterinary records.  Within each parameter various factors are scored to assess the level contributing to life time experience and these factors for each parameter can be modified to suit different species and types of animal use. Thus it can identify key events which impact on welfare, so that on-going refinements can be targeted at the specific elements that will improve the animals’ welfare and quality of life. The area of the grid at each time point, the Cumulative Welfare Assessment Score (CWAS) is then plotted against time to show changes in the animal’s Quality of Life.

 

The AWAG creates a variety of visuals displaying the different scores over time. This is extremely useful to easily visualise how an animals welfare has improved or worsened.

A Cumulative Welfare Assessment Score (CWAS) is recorded over time

Watch our videos to see how easy AWAG is to use.