A Review of Welfare Indicators of Indoor-Housed Dairy Cow as a Basis for Integrated Automatic Welfare Assessment Systems

Abstract

For on-farm welfare assessment many automatic methods have been developed to detect indicators of reduced welfare. However, there is still a need to integrate data from single sources to obtain a complete picture of the welfare of an animal. This review offers a basis for developing integrated automatic systems to assess dairy cow welfare by providing an overview of the main issues that challenge cow welfare (e.g., lameness) and of well-established indicators that could detect these issues on the farm. Based on a literature review of 4 reviews on cow welfare in general and 48 reviews on single welfare issues, we identified 18 different major welfare issues and 76 matching indicators that could be detected automatically on the farm. Several indicators, e.g., feed intake, showed a consistent association with welfare across many different issues. Although some of these indicators are discussed critically, this means there are many indicators that potentially could detect reduced welfare in general. Other types of indicators could detect one specific welfare issue, e.g., increased respiratory rate for heat stress. These different types of indicators combined provide a basis to develop integrated automatic systems that ultimately would help farmers to detect welfare problems at an early stage.

Design of Free Stalls for Dairy Herds: A Review

“…Higher yielding cows also have shorter lying times because they need to spend more time eating [33]. One should, therefore, not compare lying times strictly in order to define better welfare, but when comparing within a certain husbandry system, and taking certain cow specific characteristics like milk yield into consideration, lying time is an attractive indicator for welfare that could be measured automatically with a sensor [34]. Lying may be considered a sign of positive welfare, while standing is usually more a sign of negative welfare, and activity in general has no clear association with welfare, since increased activity may be more indicative of stress and pain, while decreased activity may be a sign of illness [34].…”

“…These traits are among the most important welfare indicators we have, and will give us the possibility to have early warnings about health, estrus, and welfare. They can be integrated in a system of precision livestock farming [34,165] where the computer can provide information about stall use, lying time, and number of lying bouts, which can be used to evaluate the quality of the free stalls.…”

Dairy Cow Behavior Is Affected by Period, Time of Day and Housing

“…One of the best ways to study animal welfare is through the observation of their behavior. In dairy cows, it is well established that lying behavior is a useful indicator of their health and welfare (e.g., [ 4 , 5 ]). Sick and lame cows usually increase their daily lying time (e.g., [ 6 , 7 , 8 ]), while mastitis is often found to reduce lying time (e.g., [ 9 , 10 ]).…”

“…As mentioned above, standing increases during heat stress (e.g., [ 16 ]) as well as in cows with mastitis [ 10 ]. Another important behavioral indicator of cow welfare is feed intake [ 5 ]. Reduced feed intake can be both a cause and a consequence of poor health and welfare.…”

The effects of cow introductions on milk production and behaviour of the herd measured with sensors

“…The more recent studies include sensor data to monitor health and behaviour (Halachmi et al, 2019;Leliveld and Provolo, 2020). The use of sensor data allows non-invasive, low workintensive analyses of a diverse range of behavioural aspects.…”