Humane Society International

The Consumer Guide to Animal Welfare Labelling - www.animalwelfarelabels.org.au - is an online guide that has been developed to help take the confusion and guesswork out of all the terms and labels that consumers are faced with when choosing animal welfare friendly products.

It has now been redeveloped to include a more user friendly design which consumers can use to easily check against the brands they buy. It will be as easy as looking for the name or logo of the brands you recognise and checking out their standards - Do they allow growth promoting hormones and antibiotics? Do they allow mutilations? What are the stocking rates for indoor and outdoor housing? Are farms independently audited against their certifications? Are they free range or bred free range?

This stand-alone site gives consumers an easy reference to the welfare standards attached to various 'free range' labels.  As always, the aim of the website is to strengthen consumer confidence in the products they buy.  More so, it is about truth in labelling and ensuring that consumers can make informed purchases based on their personal choices.

"In the absence of national labelling standards for animal welfare, there is an assortment of standards and certification schemes which promote products that support some degree of humane treatment of animals," Verna Simpson, HSI director explains. "The issue here is that standards will vary and what one label calls free range may not necessarily represent the free range standards a consumer expects."

The Consumer Guide has also been developed to work as a tool to uncover the truth behind animal welfare labelling on products.

"To help give consumers confidence, the guide checks whether or not brands are truly certified and the details of their supporting standards." Ms Simpson explains. "In doing so, it has been revealed that a variety of popular brands actually have unsubstantiated labelling which is unfair to consumers and retailers alike.  This is an important feature, as it can lead to such brands being worthy of investigation by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) and will hopefully encourage greater truth in labelling."

More information on which brands are supported by certification, what their animal welfare standards detail, and which brands are unsubstantiated is available on the consumer guide website - www.animalwelfarelabels.org.au