12. Stresses the need to review provisions pertaining to farm animal welfare measures to improve animal health, with the aim of reducing the use of veterinary pharmaceuticals; calls on the Commission to re-evaluate current provisions on maximum animal density in livestock farming, as herd sizes today often present obstacles to the treatment of individual or smaller groups of animals, providing incentives for the prophylactic use of antimicrobials; believes that focusing on livestock strains that are resistant to disease could help ensure that fewer veterinary pharmaceuticals will be needed for rearing purposes but considers that this s ...[+++]hould not replace sound farm management and animal husbandry;

(i) as feed material for farmed animals or for the feeding to farmed animals other than fur animals, and placed on the market in accordance with Article 24, except in the case of material referred to in Article 13(l) and (m);

EADGENE, a major network of excellence on the genomics of host-pathogen interactions in farm animals, was funded in 2004 and SABRE, an integrated project on fundamental genomics of farm animals, is expected to begin later this year.

From the point of view of whether you call them a livestock animal or a farmed game animal, for animal health purposes I think in a sense it's a moot point, because we've had these controls since the nineties.

Of even more concern to us is the fact that the proposal stipulates that animals for further fattening, which is a completely natural stage of the livestock rearing process, should be subject to the more restrictive measures laid down for animals for slaughter instead of the less restrictive measures laid down for breeding animals, even though the further fattening stage is a natural continuation of the livestock rearing process lasting a few months.

Recently, there has been the creation of the Canadian Livestock Identification Agency, building on the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency, to ensure that we have the proper system for all livestock, so that the databases could communicate with one another in such that way that if we have a disease, such as foot and mouth, that can affect cattle but also another species, we know where the possibly infected animals may be, whether it is pork, cattle, bison or whatever.