Abstract
Dairy goat animal welfare assessment protocols have been developed and conducted in Europe and the United Kingdom for dairy goats; however, there are no published reports of large-scale welfare assessment for dairy goats on farms in the Midwestern United States (US). Therefore, the objective of this study was to perform welfare assessment of lactating dairy goats and identify the most prevalent welfare issues on 30 farms across the Midwestern US. Thirty dairy goat farms (self-selected) were enrolled in the study if they shipped milk for human consumption (regardless of herd size). The number of lactating does on each farm ranged from 34 to 6,500 goats, with a median number of 158 lactating does (mean ± SD: 602 ± 1,708 lactating does). The protocol used was developed from available literature on goat welfare assessment but modified for use in the Midwestern US. Observations were made without handling the animals and included 22 animal-based indicators evaluated at the group- and individual-level. The observations were conducted during ~3–5 h during a milking session (either morning or afternoon) and time in the home pen. Principal components analysis (PCA) was carried out on the welfare assessment data from each farm. The first two dimensions of the PCA explained 34.8% of the variation. The PCA biplot indicated correlations between indicators. The most prevalent conditions observed across the 30 farms included any knee calluses (80.9%), any claw overgrowth (51.4%), poor hygiene (14.9%), skin lesions (8.9%), poor hair coat condition (8.3%) and any ear pathology (8.0%). These results are the first to provide the Midwestern US dairy goat industry with information to improve commercial dairy goat welfare.
Highlights
Defining animal welfare is difficult because there are multiple interpretations [1]
Animal Welfare Indicators Project (AWIN) was based on the same such principals and criteria as Welfare Quality R as they are considered necessary to cover all aspects of animal welfare [8]
The individual-level welfare assessment data are presented in Table 5 and the group-level
Summary
Defining animal welfare is difficult because there are multiple interpretations [1]. An early interpretation of animal welfare was formulated by the Farm Animal Welfare Council, named the “Five Freedoms,” and outlined the basis of acceptable levels of welfare Research on development of protocols to assess welfare at the farm-level for dairy goats evaluated multiple animal-based indicators of welfare and highlighted the major welfare issues across 24 farms in the UK [6] and 30 farms in Norway [7]. The European Animal Welfare Indicators Project (AWIN) developed a science-based, step-wise welfare assessment protocol for species (including goats, sheep, horses, donkeys, and turkeys) that had until been largely excluded from welfare assessment projects such as Welfare Quality R [8]. Development and testing of the AWIN protocol for dairy goats has since demonstrated valid, reliable, and feasible animal-based indicators of welfare in a European setting [11,12,13,14,15]. To the authors’ knowledge, no such on-farm welfare assessment protocols have been designed for, or undertaken on dairy goats in the Midwestern US
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