The Welfare Quality® project and beyond: Safeguarding farm animal well-being

A truthful snapshot of horse welfare conditions is a prerequisite for predicting the impact of any actions intended to improve the quality of life of horses. This can be achieved when welfare information, gathered by different assessors in diverse geographical areas, is valid, comparable and collected in a harmonized way. This paper aims to present the first outcomes of the Animal Welfare Indicators (AWIN) approach: the results of on-farm assessment and a reliable and harmonized data collection system. A total of 355 sport and leisure horses, stabled in 40 facilities in Italy and in Germany, were evaluated by three trained assessors using the AWIN welfare assessment protocol for horses. The AWINHorse app was used to collect, store and send data to a common server. Identified welfare issues were obesity, unsatisfactory box dimensions, long periods of confinement and lack of social interaction. The digitalized data collection was feasible in an on-farm environment, and our results suggest that this approach could prove useful in identifying the most relevant welfare issues of horses in Europe or worldwide.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Initial outcomes of a harmonized approach to collect welfare data in sport and leisure horses

Costa

Dai

Lebelt³

et al. 2017

“…Standardized methodologies have been developed in the European Welfare Quality ® (WQ) project for welfare assessment for different categories of farm animals, for example, broiler chickens and laying hens, sows, growing pigs, veal calves and dairy cattle (Blokhuis et al, 2010). The protocols contain several measurements in which the outcomes are used in a three-step multi-criteria evaluation model to enable the assignment of farms or flocks to one of four overall welfare categories (not classified, acceptable, enhanced, excellent).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…injuries or behaviour) rather than design or management criteria (e.g. pen size) (Blokhuis et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simplifying the Welfare Quality® assessment protocol for broiler chicken welfare

Jong

Hindle

Butterworth

et al. 2016

Welfare Quality ® (WQ) assessment protocols place the emphasis on animal-based measures as an indicator for animal welfare. Stakeholders, however, emphasize that a reduction in the time taken to complete the protocol is essential to improve practical applicability. We studied the potential for reduction in time to complete the WQ broiler assessment protocol and present some modifications to the protocol correcting a few errors in the original calculations. Data was used from 180 flocks assessed on-farm and 150 flocks assessed at the slaughter plant. Correlations between variables were calculated, and where correlation was moderate, meaningful and promising (in terms of time reduction), simplification was considered using one variable predicted from another variable. Correlation analysis revealed a promising correlation between severe hock burn and gait scores on-farm. Therefore, prediction of gait scores using hock burn scores was studied further as a possible simplification strategy (strategy 1). Measurements of footpad dermatitis, hock burn, cleanliness and gait score on-farm correlated moderately to highly with slaughter plant measurements of footpad dermatitis and/or hock burn, supporting substitution of on-farm measurements with slaughter plant data. A simplification analysis was performed using footpad dermatitis, hock burn, cleanliness and gait scores measured on-farm predicted from slaughter plant measurements of footpad dermatitis and hock burn (strategy 2). Simplification strategies were compared with the full assessment protocol. Close agreement was found between the full protocol and both simplification strategies although large confidence intervals were found for specificity of the simplified models. It is concluded that the proposed simplification strategies are encouraging; strategy 1 can reduce the time to complete the on-farm assessment by~1 h (25% to 33% reduction) and strategy 2 can reduce on-farm assessment time by~2 h (50% to 67% reduction). Both simplification strategies should, however, be validated further, and tested on farms with a wide distribution across the different welfare categories of WQ.

“…The holistic nature of the Welfare Quality ® protocol reflects current understanding of welfare as a multidimensional construct (Fraser and Broom, 1990), however, the time taken to carry out such an extensive assessment has been cited as limiting the potential for its practical application (Knierim and Winckler, 2009;Blokhuis et al,. 2010;de Vries et al, 2013c).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Navigating the iceberg: reducing the number of parameters within the Welfare Quality® assessment protocol for dairy cows

Heath

Browne

Mullan

et al. 2014

The Welfare Quality ® protocols provide a multidimensional assessment of welfare, which is lengthy, and hence limited in terms of practicality. The aim of this study was to investigate potential 'iceberg indicators' which could reliably predict the overall classification as a means of reducing the length of time for an assessment and so increase the feasibility of the Welfare Quality ® protocol as a multidimensional assessment of welfare. Full Welfare Quality ® assessments were carried out on 92 dairy farms in England and Wales. The farms were all classified as Acceptable or Enhanced. Logistic regression models with cross validation were used to compare model fit for the overall classification on farms. 'Absence of prolonged thirst', on its own, was found to correctly classify farms 88% of the time. More generally, the inclusion of more measures in the models was not associated with greater predictive ability for the overall classification. Absence of prolonged thirst could thus, in theory, be considered to be an iceberg indicator for the Welfare Quality ® protocol, and could reduce the length of time for a farm assessment to 15 min. Previous work has shown that the parameters within the Welfare Quality ® protocol are important and relevant for welfare assessment. However, it is argued that the credibility of the published aggregation system is compromised by the finding that one resource measure (Absence of prolonged thirst) is a major driver for the overall classification. It is therefore suggested that the prominence of Absence of prolonged thirst in this role may be better understood as an unintended consequence of the published measure aggregation system rather than as reflecting a realistic iceberg indicator.