ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Food Sci. Technol.
Sec. Food Safety and Quality Control
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frfst.2025.1603989
Remote Ante Mortem Inspection at slaughter in Sweden
Provisionally accepted
Elise Hansson1Ingrid Medin2
Viktor Almqvist1
Sofia Boqvist1
Ivar Vågsholm1Rebecka Östberg1
Arja Helena Kautto1*- 1Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
- 2Swedish National Food Agency, Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden
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Domesticated and farmed animals slaughtered commercially for human consumption undergo in compliance with European Union legislation, ante-mortem inspection (AMI) performed by an official veterinarian. Small-capacity abattoirs and game handling establishments, often located in remote areas, are resource demanding to control on-site. The aim of this study was to study the feasibility of remote ante-mortem inspection performed by veterinarian raters with limited pre-experience in AMI, and to evaluate the user experience assessed by raters with lifelong experience of digital devices in daily life.This study was performed for four days (18 sessions) at a large-capacity abattoir slaughtering pigs and four days (four sessions) at a small-capacity abattoir slaughtering cattle and sheep. Inter-rater variability between two raters, one technical support person who was conducting an on-site antemortem inspection, and one remote rater conducting a remote ante-mortem inspection over a live video feed, was assessed. The raters scored their user experience in every session.A total of 4032 pigs, thirty-nine cattle and ten sheep, were inspected over twenty-two sessions. We found at the large-capacity abattoir a prominent level of the overall agreement of 99.4%, Cohen's kappa 0.920 (95% Confidence Interval 0.888, 0.953) and Prevalence-adjusted and bias-adjusted kappa 0.989 (95 % Confidence Interval 0.983, 0.993) between the AMI on-site and remote. McNemar Chi2-test supported these results (χ 2 = 0.375, df=1, P = 0.54). The sample size at the smallcapacity abattoir was low (N=49) and marginal rating frequencies different. Fishers Exact test showed statistical differences (P < 0.001) between the results on-site and remote AMI. The average user experience scores of all categories were rated as satisfactory or better.Consequently, remote ante-mortem inspection is a feasible flexibility option as part of the official meat inspection in slaughter provided that the inspectors are trained and aligned in assessments of findings in AMI.
Keywords: Animal Health, Animal Welfare, Control flexibility, digitalized control, domestic animals, Food Safety, Meat inspection, modernizing meat control
Received: 01 Apr 2025; Accepted: 24 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hansson, Medin, Almqvist, Boqvist, Vågsholm, Östberg and Kautto. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Arja Helena Kautto, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
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