Animal health and welfare in the livestock industry: Strategy 2016 to 2021.

Animal health and welfare in the livestock industry: strategy 2016 to 2021 builds on the Animal health and welfare Strategy covering all of Great Britain that has been in place since 2004. The Strategy identifies five themes that need to be addressed to deliver improvements in animal health and welfare, and these are: skills and knowledge, disease risk, welfare, regulatory and societal impact. The actions stemming from those themes are set out in the Strategy.
In order to make livestock industry productive and sustainable, the Strategy envisages many measures, in particular it supports improvement of the industry's skill base and encourages new talent.The Scottish Government will ensure the new Farm Advisory Service promotes advice on all aspects of animal health, welfare and legislative requirements, including advise on improving business efficiency and effectiveness.
To enable more inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems, proposed interventions aim to build skills and knowledge of livestock producers, to looking for new ways to reach farmers, including hobby farmers and smallholders, with information and advice. The Strategy also highlights in particular the Government's commitment to ensure that the livestock and ancillary industries continue to have regular opportunities to contribute to both the setting of priorities for the research programme and the commissioning of relevant one off research projects.
To increase the resilience of livelihoods to disasters, main actions are directed to continue to monitor the links between animal health and welfare, and wider societal and climatic concerns (Scottish Government commits to report regularly on developments).