Use of animal based measures for the assessment of dairy cow welfare ANIBAM
Résumé
The overall aim of the project was to evaluate the use of routinely collected animal based measures (ABMs) for an evaluatio n of the overall animal welfare in dairy cow herds. ABMs being able to detect worst adverse effects in relation to animal welfare were identified based on the existing literature and expert opinion. The validity and robustness of these ABMs were evaluated and cow mortality, somatic cell count and lameness were selected for further study. A number of factors of variation were selected using expert opinion and used in a model to collate routinely collected data from Italy, Belgium and Denmark on selected ABMs . The routinely collected data was uploaded to the Data Collection Framework platform at EFSA and the data management in this process was evaluated. Five research datasets from Italy, Belgium, Denmark and France including information on ABMs as well as a m easure of ’overall animal welfare’ at herd level were analysed to evaluate the association between the ABMs (individually or in combination) and overall welfare. The measure of ’overall animal welfare’ were not the same for all datasets. Except from the It alian data, the association between the ABMs and the different overall welfare measures were generally weak. Likewise, combining more than one ABM only improved the prediction of the overall welfare in the Italian dataset. Analyses of the other datasets co uld not confirm this finding. Finally, suggestions for future recordings of ABMs not routinely collected at the moment were given with a special focus on lameness. In conclusion, t he relationship between selected ABMs and overall welfare at the herd level is complex and still not sufficiently studied. Therefore, a system using routinely collected ABMs to predict the overall welfare at herd level in dairy herds does not seem realistic based on the results from the present study
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