Abstract
Simple SummaryMany techniques have been developed to measure single indicators of reduced welfare in farm animals, such as changes in the walking pattern to detect lameness in dairy cows. However, there is still a need to combine these single measurements to get a more complete picture of the wellbeing of an animal. Based on a literature review on dairy cow welfare, this review provides a basis for the development of an integrated automatic system to assess the welfare of dairy cows on the farm. It provides an overview of the main welfare issues for dairy cows, such as lameness, heat stress, or pain and of the most established indicators that could help to detect these welfare issues on the farm. We found that there are several indicators, such as reduced feed intake, that are common to most welfare issues and that are therefore suitable to detect reduced welfare in general, while other indicators mainly identify one welfare issue, such as increased respiratory rate, as an indicator of heat stress. Combining these different types of indicators would provide a good basis to develop an integrated automatic system that could assist farmers in the detection of reduced welfare on their farms.For on-farm welfare assessment many automatic methods have been developed to detect indicators of reduced welfare. However, there is still a need to integrate data from single sources to obtain a complete picture of the welfare of an animal. This review offers a basis for developing integrated automatic systems to assess dairy cow welfare by providing an overview of the main issues that challenge cow welfare (e.g., lameness) and of well-established indicators that could detect these issues on the farm. Based on a literature review of 4 reviews on cow welfare in general and 48 reviews on single welfare issues, we identified 18 different major welfare issues and 76 matching indicators that could be detected automatically on the farm. Several indicators, e.g., feed intake, showed a consistent association with welfare across many different issues. Although some of these indicators are discussed critically, this means there are many indicators that potentially could detect reduced welfare in general. Other types of indicators could detect one specific welfare issue, e.g., increased respiratory rate for heat stress. These different types of indicators combined provide a basis to develop integrated automatic systems that ultimately would help farmers to detect welfare problems at an early stage.
Highlights
The need to improve the welfare of dairy cows has for a long time been underrated, both by the public [1] and by the legislators [2]
The aim of this review is to provide a basis for developing integrated automatic systems to assess dairy cow welfare by, first, obtaining an overview of cow welfare and, second, selecting the welfare indicators that need to be measured
To understand which of these indicators may be most suitable for an integrated automatic assessment system we evaluate them according to the two requirements described in the previous section
Summary
The need to improve the welfare of dairy cows has for a long time been underrated, both by the public [1] and by the legislators [2]. Tied-up dairy cows may have considerably lowered risks of hoof problems and lameness, but, due to lack of movement and social contact, would still be considered to have bad welfare [5]. Certain health risks (e.g., ammoniac exposure) may not be recognized by the animal [4,7] This highlights the importance of assessing animal welfare as a whole, by taking into account different welfare aspects and integrating these into a complete picture. In farm practice, this could be achieved by integrating data from different welfare indicators to provide an overall evaluation of the animal unit [8]. In small-scale farms, the farmer would naturally perform such data integration by observing different welfare indicators during daily routine or close examination of each animal and by combining these different indicators to make an assessment
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