Welfare Standards for fur farmed animals (WelFur)

The WelFur project follows from a desire by the industry to improve and standardise welfare standards in fur farming and to meet legitimate, public concern about the welfare of fur-farmed animals.

Farmers, auction houses, wholesalers, retailers and consumers.

WelFur is a science-based, practical and reliable on-farm assessment systems as an instrument to monitor and improve welfare and demonstrate, in a transparent way, good animal welfare practices.

WelFur is financed entirely by the industry and its members.

The implementation of WelFur will cost the industry approx. 40 million euro over the period 2009 - 2023.

WelFur is an on-farm assessment tool to measure the actual level of welfare. Assessments is carried out by an independent, third-party and results will be communicated to the fur farmer in order to encourage the farmer to take the most appropriate steps to improve animal welfare. As in Welfare Quality®, once all the measurements have been recorded on a farm, a bottom-up approach is followed to produce an overall assessment of animal welfare on that particular farm. First the data collected (i.e. the values obtained for the different measurements) on the farm are combined to calculate criterion-scores; then criterion-scores are combined to calculate principle-scores and finally the farm is assigned to one welfare category according to the principle scores it attained.

Following a concrete assessment and the calculation of a score to determine the actual level of welfare standards on the farm, Fur Europe issues a certificate to testify that the particular farm is part of the WelFur assessment scheme. Participation in WelFur is in principle voluntary. However, more than 90 percent of all fur farms in Europe have enrolled in the assessment scheme. The auction houses, through which farmers sell their skins, have announced that they will only sell WelFur-certified skins from 2020 onward.