Division (a) Sampling design:

When designing their sampling plan at slaughterhouse level, Member States shall take into account EFSA technical specifications on randomised sampling for harmonised monitoring of antimicrobial resistance in zoonotic and commensal bacteria^f1.

Member States shall ensure a proportionate stratified sampling of samples of caecal content in slaughterhouses processing at least 60 % of the specific domestic animal population in the Member States with an even distribution over the monitoring period of the samples taken, and, to the extent possible, a randomisation of the sampling days of each month. The samples shall be taken from healthy animals sampled from randomly selected epidemiological units. The epidemiological unit for broilers and fattening turkeys is the flock. The epidemiological unit for fattening pigs and bovine animals under one year of age is the slaughter batch. Only one sample from the same epidemiological unit shall be taken per year. Each sample shall be taken from one carcass randomly selected from the epidemiological unit. However, for broilers, each sample shall be taken from ten carcasses randomly selected from the epidemiological unit.

The number of samples collected per slaughterhouse shall be proportional to the annual throughput of each slaughterhouse covered by the sampling plan.