Vad sätter djurskyddsnivån - regeln eller kontrollen?

This paper describes an ongoing research project at the Swedish University of Agriculture about animal welfare rules. Some results about content and requirements in relation to control guidelines are presented. The paper covers both the Swedish animal welfare legislation and voluntary private standards, since animal owners of today often have several kinds of regulations to comply with. Some of the requirements that were expressed in one way in a regulation, i e as resource, management or animal based requirements, were suggested to also be controlled in other ways in the corresponding guidelines. For example, a resource based requirement could be measured not only by measuring the resources but also by using management and/or animal based parameters. Further - more, the suggested control methods differed between different regulations, for example if animal welfare should be assessed on the basis of the individual animal or at a herd level. The legislation had an individual approach while the Arlagården and Seal of Quality standards suggested more group assessments to be carried out. This means that even if similar requirements were stated in the regulations in similar ways, there were differences regarding when these requirements were considered as being complied with or not, depending on if the assessment were made at individual or herd level. We also saw that the requirements could be expressed quite impre - cisely, leaving the evaluation of and de - cision on compliance or not entirely to the inspector. Even if different regulations seem to have common requirements there may be differences in the outcome with respect to the actual animal welfare levels in the end. This is due to the use of vague concepts in the legislation and variations in the ways of measuring during inspections. We therefore argue that it is important to distinguish be tween requirements and measurements in order to make the policy process more transparent and predictable.