Scientific Approaches For On-Farm Animal Welfare Assessment

Modelling Farm Animal Welfare

The use of models in the life sciences has greatly expanded in scope and advanced in technique in recent decades. However, the range, type and complexity of models used in farm animal welfare is comparatively poor, despite the great scope for use of modeling in this field of research. In this paper, we review the different modeling approaches used in farm animal welfare science to date, discuss...

Effects of disease on farm animal welfare

Health is an important part of welfare and whenever an animal is diseased, welfare is poorer than when there is no disease. This point is often not recognised adequately by those studying animal welfare. Also, the full extent of the effects of clinically diagnosed disease on the welfare of the animal is seldom quantified. This quantification of the extent of poor welfare during disease is impor...

Sequential sampling: a novel method in farm animal welfare assessment.

Lameness in dairy cows is an important welfare issue. As part of a welfare assessment, herd level lameness prevalence can be estimated from scoring a sample of animals, where higher levels of accuracy are associated with larger sample sizes. As the financial cost is related to the number of cows sampled, smaller samples are preferred. Sequential sampling schemes have been used for informing dec...

Economics and Farm Animal Welfare

Science-based assessment of animal welfare: farm animals.

Animal welfare is to do with the feelings experienced by animals: the absence of strong negative feelings, usually called suffering, and (probably) the presence of positive feelings, usually called pleasure. In any assessment of welfare, it is these feelings that should be assessed. Because feelings are subjective, they cannot be investigated directly. However, there are indirect methods by whi...