Sensitivity of the Welfare Quality® broiler chicken protocol to differences between intensively reared indoor flocks: which factors explain overall classification?

Abstract

There is a large demand for holistic welfare assessment systems that result in a singular balanced summary of welfare. The Welfare Quality ® (WQ) broiler protocol summarizes 18 welfare measures into four principles ('good feeding', 'good housing', 'good health' and 'appropriate behaviour'), which are then integrated into one overall category ('excellent', 'enhanced', 'acceptable' or 'not classified'). But the protocol is time consuming which hampers implementation. Furthermore, WQ's aim to assess animal welfare in a wide range of husbandry systems may decrease its ability to discriminate between flocks from the same system. We applied the protocol in the context of intensive indoor rearing to assess whether it discriminated sufficiently between flocks, could be shortened without losing essential information, and provided a balanced summary of welfare. The vast majority of the flocks (88%) received the same overall classification (acceptable) whilst all other flocks received an adjacent classification (enhanced), suggesting poor discriminative capacity. For 95% of the flocks overall classification was explained by two measures only ('drinker space' and 'stocking density'). A system based on these two measures would reduce assessment time from 3.5 h to a few minutes. However, both measures' validity can be questioned as they are risk factors for poor welfare rather than animal-based outcome measures and they suffer from methodological weaknesses. Furthermore, the possibility for such an extreme simplification raises doubts on whether the overall classification reflects a balanced summary of different welfare aspects. In line with this, overall classification was not affected by replacing single measures within the 'good health' and 'appropriate behaviour' principles with realistically attainable minima or maxima for intensively reared flocks. Even replacing either of these two principles entirely with their realistically obtainable minimum or maximum did not affect classification. Such insensitivity to change may discourage attempts to improve the welfare of intensively reared flocks when assessments are made based on the overall classification. This calls for an adjustment of the classification system, which is currently being developed by the Welfare Quality Network.

Associations between qualitative behaviour assessments and measures of leg health, fear and mortality in Norwegian broiler chicken flocks

“…This may be an inherent issue in an industry where the production system and management in general is highly standardised, as is the case in broiler production. This was also the case when Buijs et al (2017) tested the sensitivity of the WQ broiler protocol to detect differences between intensively reared flocks, where they experienced that the observed values for health parameters often where extreme (either very high or very low). For FPD and lameness, the scores were low, and the observed range for measures of appropriate behaviour were very narrow, except for QBA (Buijs et al, 2017).…”

“…This was also the case when Buijs et al (2017) tested the sensitivity of the WQ broiler protocol to detect differences between intensively reared flocks, where they experienced that the observed values for health parameters often where extreme (either very high or very low). For FPD and lameness, the scores were low, and the observed range for measures of appropriate behaviour were very narrow, except for QBA (Buijs et al, 2017). This wider variation in QBA scores may thus make it more suitable for detecting variation among farms, given that its validity is established.…”

“…With this in mind, QBA could 5 potentially be used as a screening tool to identify flocks with health and pain issues that compromise the welfare to a degree where the animals' emotional state is affected. QBA is used in a few recently published studies on broiler welfare (Bassler et al, 2013;Buijs et al, 2017;de Jong et al, 2016;Federici et al, 2016). However, apart from one study in which no moderate or strong correlations were found between QBA scores and other measures in the WQ protocol (de Jong et al, 2016), there is a scarcity of information about how QBA relates to other animal-based welfare indicators in broilers.…”

A Review of Welfare Assessment Methods in Reptiles, and Preliminary Application of the Welfare Quality® Protocol to the Pygmy Blue-Tongue Skink, Tiliqua adelaidensis, Using Animal-Based Measures

“…That is, it was found through testing this tool in production animals that overall welfare classification could be explained by two resource-based measures only. A system based on these two measures could reduce the assessment time to a few minutes, though with the risk of losing a holistic view [83,84].…”

Quantifying defence cascade responses as indicators of pig affect and welfare using computer vision methods

“…Some have been systematically validated against other indicators or by using manipulations of affective state grounded in a clearly-argued rationale, others less so 12,16 . In many cases, a major barrier to uptake is the time required to collect and interpret the relevant data [17][18][19] . Consequently, there is still a need for new validated and reliable indicators of animal affect and welfare that are easy to implement under field conditions.…”