Abstract
Beef cattle are the third most numerous terrestrial farmed animals worldwide. Factors such as geographical region, animal category, breed, and rearing system pose specific animal welfare challenges that can have an impact on animal and public health. This article uses text mining (TM) and topic analysis (TA) to explore the scientific literature on beef cattle welfare published in English from 1990 to 2019. Our aim was to reveal the main research topics and their evolution over time. Our analysis showed that the three most relevant themes in research since 1990 have to do with calf behaviour and management, efficiency, and environmental sustainability, and the effects of transport and slaughter on meat quality. Topics showing the most marked increase in the number of papers published deal with stakeholders' perceptions and market opportunities for added-value beef products and risk factors for morbidity and mortality, especially in relation to calf health, antimicrobial use, and antimicrobial resistance. The results indicate a particular focus on the welfare of calves, especially in the veal industry. Pain relief during the castration of calves and bulls also featured prominently. Research is also increasingly assessing aspects of beef cattle welfare that are interlinked to meat quality, the social and environmental sustainability of the sector in relation to market opportunities, and public health. The identified topics represent a basic source of information that can be used for further and more detailed analyses (e.g., systematic reviews) focussed on specific research themes or geographical areas.
Highlights
Beef cattle are the third most numerous farmed animals worldwide, with 71.61 million tonnes produced globally in 2018
Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) applied to academic papers on beef cattle welfare captured several fields of investigation that are of known relevance, for instance pain relief during invasive procedures, the effects of transport and slaughter, the management of heifers and calves, and the treatment and prevention of disease
Our LDA topic analysis of scholarly articles on beef cattle welfare published in English between 1990 and 2019 shows an increasing scrutiny into the health and welfare of calves, including behavioural aspects
Summary
Beef cattle (including buffaloes) are the third most numerous farmed animals worldwide (after poultry and pigs), with 71.61 million tonnes produced globally in 2018. The EU produced 10.64 million tonnes of beef meat [1]. Cattle meat production has more than doubled since 1961, increasing from 28 million tonnes per year to 68 million tonnes in 2014 [1]. Between 2000 and 2050 the global cattle population might grow from 1.5 billion in 2000 to 2.6 billion [2]. Beef cattle farming practices differ substantially across the world, ranging from extensive to intensive and using different breeds [3]. Each rearing system presents specific challenges for animal welfare [4,5,6] and, while guidance on best practice is available for some of the identified problems, knowledge gaps persist, for instance in the areas of disease prevention and monitoring, optimisation of live transport, use of environmental features, and enrichments [4]
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