Using the Welfare Quality® protocol to assess the welfare of dairy cattle

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Sara Casanova dos
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10348/11919
• topic: animal welfare; dairy cattle

Farm animal welfare has gained increased importance in today’s society. To show consumers that welfare standards exist and are routinely monitored, the European Commission launched the Welfare Quality ® project. This project developed species-specific protocols that provide a score for 4 main principles (good feeding, good housing, good health and appropriate behaviour) based on 12 criteria that are measured on the farm. In the past few years, companies that specialize in selling animal products have started exploring the implementation of certification programs based on the Welfare Quality® protocol to improve the consumers' trust. The products are usually sold with differentiated packaging or labels. This kind of strategy is beneficial for both the citizens and the farmers. This project aimed to assess the level of animal welfare in Portuguese dairy farms using the Welfare Quality® protocol. The data was collected during internal audits that took place in 2020 (n = 20) and 2021 (n = 25) and all farms scored an “enhanced” level of animal welfare. The results were then complemented with observations made on the farms during the audits that took place in 2022. However, the results regarding animals lying partly/completely outside the lying area (7,83% in 2020; 9,73% in 2021), ocular discharge (33,9% in 2020; 31,6% in 2021), integument alterations (54,1% in 2020; 56,1% in 2021), dirty upper (68,8% in 2020; 69,8% in 2021) and lower legs (78,0% in 2020; 70,2% in 2021), and dirty udder (29,0% in 2020; 32,1% in 2021) were considered insufficient. This shows that regardless of the farms’ “enhanced” score, there is still a lot of room for improvement.