Health scores for farmed animals: Screening pig health with register data from public and private databases.

Franziska Nienhaus,Thomas Kornhoff,Maria Hartmann,Lothar Kreienbrock,Thomas May,Diana Meemken,Sabrina Heß,Clara Schoneberg,Anna Wendt,Juan J Loor

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0228497

Abstract

There are growing demands to ensure animal health and, from a broader perspective, animal welfare, especially for farmed animals. In addition to the newly developed welfare assessment protocols, which provide a harmonised method to measure animal health during farm visits, the question has been raised whether data from existing data collections can be used for an assessment without a prior farm visit. Here, we explore the possibilities of developing animal health scores for fattening pig herds using a) official meat inspection results, b) data on antibiotic usage and c) data from the QS (QS Qualität und Sicherheit GmbH) Salmonella monitoring programme in Germany. The objective is to aggregate and combine these register-like data into animal health scores that allow the comparison and benchmark of participating pig farms according to their health status. As the data combined in the scores have different units of measure and are collected in different abattoirs with possibly varying recording practices, we chose a relative scoring approach using z-transformations of different entrance variables. The final results are aggregated scores in which indicators are combined and weighted based on expert opinion according to their biological significance for animal health. Six scores have been developed to describe different focus areas, such as "Respiratory Health", "External Injuries/ Alterations", "Animal Management", "Antibiotic Usage", "Salmonella Status" and "Mortality". These "focus" area scores are finally combined into an "Overall Score". To test the scoring method, existing routine data from 1,747 pig farm units in Germany are used; these farm units are members of the QS Qualität und Sicherheit GmbH (QS) quality system. In addition, the scores are directly validated for 38 farm units. For these farm units, the farmers and their veterinarians provided their perceptions concerning the actual health status and existing health problems. This process allowed a comparison of the scoring results with actual health information using kappa coefficients as a measure of similarity. The score testing of the focus area scores using real information resulted in normalised data. The results of the validation showed satisfactory agreement between the calculated scores for the project farm units and the actual health information provided by the related farmers and veterinarians. In conclusion, the developed scoring method could become a viable benchmark and risk assessment instrument for animal health on a larger scale under the conditions of the German system.

Highlights

The last decade has seen new impulses and demands to ensure animal health and to improve animal welfare
A variety of activities are proof of these tendencies, such as increased research into methods for measurement of animal health and animal welfare [5, 6], the intention to introduce a label for animal welfare or the implementation of new legal requirements for farmers to document the health status of their animals
Its feasibility was tested by the application of real live data from the QS routine to show the distribution of original measures, transformed values and final scores. It was validated by comparing the scores with information on the actual health status of selected project farms to verify that the animal health scores developed were valid, i.e., that they reflected the actual health status and enabled farm unit benchmarking

Summary

Introduction

The last decade has seen new impulses and demands to ensure animal health and to improve animal welfare. To maintain or improve health conditions of food producing animals in the longer term, an essential first step consists of developing methods that allow the assessment of animal health and identify health deficiencies at herd level. The assessment of animal health or welfare is usually based on quantifiable indicators. There are two groups of indicators: resource-based indicators (e.g., floor type, space allocation) and animal-based indicators, reflecting the response of animals as indicators of their welfare and health deficits (e.g., injuries, mortality, morbidity). The present project confines itself to the use of animal-based measures, which have been shown to be preferable for the assessment of pig herds [7]

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