Application of the Welfare Quality® protocol to assess growing pigs kept under intensive conditions in Spain

Temple, Déborah; Dalmau, Antoni; Ruiz-de-la-Torre, J.L.; Manteca, Xavier; Velarde, Antonio

doi:10.1016/j.jveb.2010.10.003

Cited by 73 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…On the other hand, by using real data some measures may have low variation or non-prevalence on farms, and thus, it may be difficult to assess the sensitivity of the model for these measures. However, we found comparable results with the study of Temple et al (2011a) and thus we could assume that our results may be representative of the growing pigs. Running the WQ protocol on a larger scale of farms may be necessary to obtain more information on the actual variation in the welfare measures, due to the fact that few studies have yet been carried out.…”

Section: Datasupporting

confidence: 87%

“…First, the low influence of bursitis in this study could have been caused by its low variation at farm level. For bursitis 1 and bursitis 2, respectively, mean values and SD of 50.74 ± 13.75 and 0.96 ± 1.32 were found, whereas Temple et al (2011a) presented values with higher variation for these measures, 45.06 ± 21.04 and 4.4 ± 5.6, respectively. Second, for manure on the body, similar values to Temple et al (2011a) were found.…”

Section: Sensitivity Analysismentioning

confidence: 86%

“…For bursitis 1 and bursitis 2, respectively, mean values and SD of 50.74 ± 13.75 and 0.96 ± 1.32 were found, whereas Temple et al (2011a) presented values with higher variation for these measures, 45.06 ± 21.04 and 4.4 ± 5.6, respectively. Second, for manure on the body, similar values to Temple et al (2011a) were found. However, although manure 2 assessed a severe condition of welfare and manure 1 a moderate condition, the results did not indicate a greater influence of the severe condition but of the moderate condition.…”

Section: Sensitivity Analysismentioning

confidence: 86%

“…The low variation of some measures could explain the low influence on improving or worsening the welfare both at the criteria and principle levels of these measures due to the fact that the first and the third quartiles of the measures were not representative of an improvement or a worsening in the level of welfare. The means and standard deviation for the measures with low incidence were compared with the means and standard deviation of welfare measures presented in the study of Temple et al (2011a), where the WQ protocol was run to assess the welfare of growing pigs kept under intensive conditions in Spain. This comparison aimed at estimating whether the low influence of these measures might only have occurred in our study due to the values chosen as an improved or a worsened situation of welfare, or whether the low influence of these measures can be generalised due to similar prevalence in other studies.…”

Section: Sensitivity Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, classification of some of these farms was compared with the general impression of observers who carried out audits of the farms (Botreau et al, 2009). As publication of the protocols, different studies on the validation of the measures used in the protocol have been carried out (Temple et al, 2011a(Temple et al, , 2011b(Temple et al, , 2012a(Temple et al, , 2012b(Temple et al, and 2013, assessing whether the measures included in the protocol are sensitive enough to distinguish between different types of housing systems, and between farms. However, there are few studies that have assessed whether the model is sensitive at criteria, principle or overall assessment level, and whether it can distinguish between different farms (de Vries et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Validation of a multi-criteria evaluation model for animal welfare

Martin¹,

Czycholl²,

Buxadé

et al. 2017

Animal

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The aim of this paper was to validate an alternative multi-criteria evaluation system to assess animal welfare on farms based on the Welfare Quality ® (WQ) project, using an example of welfare assessment of growing pigs. This alternative methodology aimed to be more transparent for stakeholders and more flexible than the methodology proposed by WQ. The WQ assessment protocol for growing pigs was implemented to collect data in different farms in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. In total, 44 observations were carried out. The aggregation system proposed in the WQ protocol follows a three-step aggregation process. Measures are aggregated into criteria, criteria into principles and principles into an overall assessment. This study focussed on the first two steps of the aggregation. Multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) was used to produce a value of welfare for each criterion and principle. The utility functions and the aggregation function were constructed in two separated steps. The MACBETH (Measuring Attractiveness by a Categorical-Based Evaluation Technique) method was used for utility function determination and the Choquet integral (CI) was used as an aggregation operator. The WQ decision-makers' preferences were fitted in order to construct the utility functions and to determine the CI parameters. The validation of the MAUT model was divided into two steps, first, the results of the model were compared with the results of the WQ project at criteria and principle level, and second, a sensitivity analysis of our model was carried out to demonstrate the relative importance of welfare measures in the different steps of the multi-criteria aggregation process. Using the MAUT, similar results were obtained to those obtained when applying the WQ protocol aggregation methods, both at criteria and principle level. Thus, this model could be implemented to produce an overall assessment of animal welfare in the context of the WQ protocol for growing pigs. Furthermore, this methodology could also be used as a framework in order to produce an overall assessment of welfare for other livestock species. Two main findings are obtained from the sensitivity analysis, first, a limited number of measures had a strong influence on improving or worsening the level of welfare at criteria level and second, the MAUT model was not very sensitive to an improvement in or a worsening of single welfare measures at principle level. The use of weighted sums and the conversion of disease measures into ordinal scores should be reconsidered.

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Section: Datasupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Sensitivity Analysismentioning

confidence: 86%