Animal health and welfare planning improves udder health and cleanliness but not leg health in Austrian dairy herds

Abstract

Animal health and welfare planning is considered an important tool for herd management; however, its effectiveness is less well known. The aim of this study was to conduct animal health and welfare planning on 34 Austrian dairy farms and to evaluate changes in health and welfare after 1 yr. After an initial assessment using the Welfare Quality protocol (Welfare Quality Consortium, Lelystad, the Netherlands), results were reported back to the farmers. Health and welfare area(s) in which both the farmer and the researcher regarded improvement as important were discussed. Management practices and husbandry measures were chosen according to the respective farm situation. One year after interventions had been initiated, farms were reassessed, and the degree of implementation of improvement measures was recorded. The average implementation rate was 57% and thus relatively high when compared with other studies. High degrees of implementation were achieved related to cleanliness and udder health, at 77 and 63%, respectively. Intervention measures addressing udder health were mostly easy to incorporate in the daily routine and led to a reduced somatic cell score, whereas this score increased in herds without implementation of measures. The decrease in cows with dirty teats was more pronounced when measures were implemented compared with control farms. The implementation rate regarding leg health (46%) was comparably low in the present study, and leg health did not improve even when measures were implemented. Lying comfort, social behavior, and human-animal relationship did not require interventions and were therefore seldom chosen by farmers as part of health and welfare plans. In conclusion, the structured, participatory process of animal health and welfare planning appears to be a promising way to improve at least some animal health and welfare issues.

The ‘Real Welfare’ scheme: benchmarking welfare outcomes for commercially farmed pigs

“…The reduction of the recorded prevalence might be the result of a better management of sick/injured pigs which have been moved to hospital pens. Whether there is a real reduction of the prevalence, or better management of hospital pens, it is known that benchmarking of health and welfare measures can lead to greater awareness and motivation to improve (Tremetsberger et al ., 2015 ). For the farms with initially higher prevalence of welfare outcomes (above 90th percentile), the reduction for all welfare outcomes also suggests improvement of the welfare status following the implementation of the scheme.…”

An update on environmental mastitis: Challenging perceptions

“…In dairy cattle, mastitis is a major cause of biological inefficiency or waste, for example, through lower yields, increased culling, discarded milk and impacts on fertility (Halasa et al, 2007;Seegers, Fourichon, & Beaudeau, 2003). In addition, mastitis affects animal welfare, which is highly valued in many industrialized countries (Byrd, Widmar, & Fulton, 2017;Tremetsberger, Leeb, & Winckler, 2015). Thus, there are many reasons to control mastitis in dairy cattle.…”

Modified ‘Stable Schools’ as a Consulting Tool for Organic Dairy Herds

“…However, managing a farm according to organic principles does not automatically guarantee high levels of animal health and welfare. With regard to the great impact of farm managers' behaviour and attitudes on animal health and welfare [2], implementing animal health plans was recommended in order to motivate organic farmers to continuously and actively improve animal health and welfare on their farms [3]. Herd health plans should be based on the assessment and evaluation of current farm data and real farm circumstances combined with feedback, planning the implementation of farm-specific interventions in a continuous process of development and improvement of animal health and welfare [1,4].…”

“…Within the ANIPLAN-project, 'Stable Schools' were adopted in seven European countries, including Austria, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom [7]. Different 'Stable Schools' or herd health plan projects handled different animal health and welfare issues such as improving udder health, phasing out antibiotics on organic dairy farms through herd health plans [3,7,11,12], or lameness reduction in dairy herds [3,13]. Especially in dairy production, 'Stable Schools' have proved to be useful to enhance animal health and welfare in recent years [3,6,8,11,13,14].…”

“…The attitudes of farmers participating in 'Stable Schools' or other herd health plan projects were mainly very positive [4,6,15] and the compliance of dairy farmers to implement measures was high [3,15]. Reasons given for high implementation of interventions included ease of implementation, integrability in the farm routine and daily working routine, and the requirement of only little capital [3].…”