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The article discusses the challenges to conducting a welfare risk assessment in farm animals. The authors suggest that risk assessment is adopted to study welfare problems across different species in order to set priorities in terms of policy-making. The main factors to risk assessment are the intensity of consequences, the duration affected by consequences and the prevalence. The authors believe that it is also important to know about the hazards themselves.

The article evaluates existing studies concerning inherited diseases in local horse breeds. The research was performed on electronic bibliographic databases for published research and online databases of inherited diseases in animals, where 102 of 203 studies addressed inherited diseases on horses. Results showed that 47 breeds of horses in Great Britain were claimed to be predisposed to one or more inherited diseases, which were caused by either genetic or environmental factors.

The article presents a study which examined the use of risk analysis and severity diagrams as means of mapping the overall problem of inherited disorders in pedigree dogs and, more specifically, the welfare impact of specific diseases in particular breeds. Welfare hazard in terms of risk assessment is characterized by the intensity of the adverse effect that the hazard causes, among others. One method for comparing different inherited diseases in the absence of reliable prevalence data is to consider the relative severity of conditions.