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Ute Knierim presents Oral paper 26
In session 5: Development and improvement of welfare assessment protocols
Friday, 12 September 2008 from 11h45-12h00 in the Aula chaired by Linda Keeling
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Oral paper 26
ON-FARM WELFARE ASSESSMENT IN CATTLE – QUO VADIS
U. Knierim 1 , C. Winckler 2
1 Department of Farm Animal Behaviour and Husbandry, University of Kassel, Germany
2 Department of Sustainable Agricultural Systems, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences
Vienna, Austria
Welfare Quality® aims to develop feasible and scientifically sound on-farm welfare assessment
systems with a focus on animal-based measures. After three years participation in this work
regarding cattle, we take a brief look on achievements and remaining challenges considering the
central criteria validity, reliability and feasibility.
Many welfare measures selected such as lameness or agonistic interactions have convincing face
validity. However, often information is lacking on degrees of welfare impairment, e.g. of different
lesion types. Other measures such as social licking were found doubtful as indicator of positive
emotion, as it might merely alleviate poor welfare.
Reliability issues were largely neglected in the past. Welfare Quality® revealed the difficulty for
many measures to achieve acceptable inter-observer reliability. Moreover, generally accepted limits
(R≥0.7, PABAKs≥0.4) may mean substantial deviations between results form different observers.
Clearly, recording methods need to be further improved and tested. Another aspect is consistency of
results over time. If a farm’s general welfare level shall be certified, a similar ranking at different
times must be achieved save there were major changes. Numerous highly welfare relevant measures
that occur infrequently (e.g. abnormal or play behaviours) cannot consistently be detected in shortterm
observations. This dilemma needs further efforts to be solved.
For feasibility the main constraint is available time. Currently e.g. the dairy assessment takes on
average about 6 net hours, varying depending on herd size. About one third of measures are
behavioural, taking about 3 hours, one third clinical, taking 2.5 hours, and one third management-
and resource-based, taking less than 0.5 hours. If the assessment shall seriously focus on animalbased
measures and be scientifically sound, it will be difficult to reduce the time needed.
First essential steps in the development of a welfare assessment system have been taken. In the
future validity and reliability issues need further attention.
Contact information: Ute Knierim or email knierim@wiz.uni-kassel.de
Complete address: Department of Farm Animal Behaviour and Husbandry, University of Kassel,
Germany
Species: Dairy cattle