Main topics to be addressed in the workshops are:

• Overview of main issues regarding animal welfare during road transport (lecture)
• Checks on journey planning, journey implementation and enforcement of animal welfare requirements
• Use of TRACES to collect necessary information for official controls on animal welfare during transport
• Risk-based selection of transporters/consignments for retrospective checks
• Retrospective checks on journey logs using SNS data and temperature records, and enforcement
• Auditing transport companies
• Auditing/supervising Local Veterinary Units’ activities
• Common constraints, challenges, weaknesses and good practices

Target participants

The training will be addressed to competent authority officials organising, implementing and enforcing legislation on animal welfare during road transport from all levels of the authorities (local, regional, central) and a small number of additional stakeholders. The groups that should be targeted are:
a) Local offices approving many journey logs during each year
b) Regional authorities in charge of supervising those local offices
c) Central authorities supervising/auditing animal welfare during transport
d) Authorities deciding the annual programme on animal welfare checks during transport
e) Selected stakeholders from industry/NGO/other organisations with extensive experience in the subject area, subject to Commission approval and who have committed to disseminating training material within their organisations

Dissemination

The BTSF programme is based on the “train the trainers” approach, and for this reason dissemination of the received knowledge is fundamental for the trainings to have a greater impact. Participants will be requested to commit themselves to disseminate the information received via different methods, i.e. informing colleagues about the information received at the training, distributing the training materials, preparing informative articles in the professional national or, if possible, in international journals, preparing presentations based on the training materials for the staff of national Competent Authorities or other disseminating methods which could be appropriate to share the information received via the BTSF training. During the course participants will be provided with a training package to be used as supporting dissemination material.