India has shown robust growth in food animal production in the last three decades thereby increasing the domestic supply and demand of food products such as meat, egg and milk. Poultry production (chicken meat and eggs) has been growing at 8 to 10 percent per annum for a couple of decades. Milk production and red meat production (particularly goat meat) also continues to grow, all of which contribute to high domestic availability of animal protein which in turn have the potential to reduce malnutrition in vulnerable populations. One of the factors which helped India to increase production of animal protein, apart from genetic improvements was intensification of farm management which is largely copied from western countries, particularly in poultry production and in some aspects in dairy production, albeit more recently. Most western countries have realized that intensification without proper checks and balances is not always a good thing because the increase in production comes at the cost of farm animal welfare and other sustainability issues such as antibiotic resistance and environmental degradation. How can India increase animal protein production while safeguarding animal welfare standards, reduce antibiotic use, and ensure environmental protection? These are the million dollar questions farmers, producers, animal scientists and veterinarians should be working on now. Our focus in this editorial will be to highlight some practical ways to move forward for improving farm animal welfare in India.

References

Citation

Citation: Roy RC and Roy S. “Improving Farm Animal Welfare in India: The Way Forward”. Acta Scientific Veterinary Sciences 2.2 (2020): 01-02.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Roy RC and Roy S. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.