Third-party welfare auditing is essential for making welfare certification meaningful rather than marketing.
Welfare certification is only as valuable as its verification system. Self-certification by producers is unreliable — the economic incentives to misrepresent welfare conditions are significant. Third-party auditing — where trained assessors make unannounced farm visits and assess animals against welfare outcome measures — provides far more reliable information. However, audit quality varies enormously. Auditors who spend too little time on farm, focus on input measures rather than animal-based outcomes, or develop relationships with regular farms that compromise independence all produce audit findings that do not reliably reflect actual welfare. Strengthening auditing standards is essential.