Attitudes of South Brazilian sheep farmers to animal welfare and sentience

Abstract

We investigated self-reported attitudes of 148 South Brazilian sheep farmers to animal welfare and sentience. Many farmers (73.0%) knew animal welfare superficially. Farmers that worked for longer in the sheep industry and that raised sheep for commercial purposes mentioned more commonly that they had knowledge about animal welfare (P<0.05). Terms related to freedom from hunger, thirst and malnutrition were the most used to define animal welfare, cited 24.9% of the times. The majority claimed that their animals experience good levels of welfare (93.2%), especially farmers that kept bigger flocks (P<0.05). However, many respondents believed that sheep welfare could be improved on their farms (71.6%), mainly farmers with less experience in the sheep industry (P<0.01). High scores of sentience were attributed to sheep by farmers with frequent contact with their animals (P<0.05). According to the farmers, castration causes the highest levels of suffering to sheep (32.4%) and shearing, the lowest (50.0%). South Brazilian farmer knowledge about animal welfare, attitudes to sentience and recognition of suffering need improvement.

Sheep Farmers’ Perception of Welfare and Pain Associated with Routine Husbandry Practices in Chile

“…Castration and tail docking were the only husbandry practices in which the totality of sheep farmers agreed as inducing pain (Table 2). These results are contrary to those reported by Dwyer [21] and Tamioso et al [47] in the United Kingdom and Brazil, respectively. In the study of Dwyer [21], 15.8% of farmers indicated that tail docking was a painless procedure and of the remaining 84.2% only associated this practice with mild to moderate pain (range 2–6, in a 1 to 10 scale).…”

“…Also, more than half of the surveyed farmers agreed that animal welfare is important to ensure animal health and production. These findings are in agreement with those reported by Australian [46] and Brazilian farmers [47]. The most important animal welfare issues identified by sheep farmers were associated with nutrition and water availability.…”

“…Castration was perceived by sheep farmers as the most painful husbandry practice for lambs, followed by tail docking and animal identification (Table 2), which is in agreement with some scientific evidence [6,26,47]. Using a similar pain scale, Scott et al [26] also found that veterinarians gave higher pain scores to rubber ring castration than tail docking (median pain score 6 vs. 4).…”

“…In the study of Dwyer [21], 15.8% of farmers indicated that tail docking was a painless procedure and of the remaining 84.2% only associated this practice with mild to moderate pain (range 2–6, in a 1 to 10 scale). The results of Dwyer [21] and Tamioso et al [47] reported that castration was associated with mild to severe pain. However, Dwyer [21] found a positive correlation between tail docking and castration scores, similar to the findings obtained in the present study.…”

Factors Related to Animal Neglect in Brazilian Laboratories

“…Opinions about animal emotions that were revealed by this study show that mammals are perceived as having a higher degree of sentience when compared to other animals. This finding is in agreement with other studies, 26 –29,30 which reported that species more phylogenetically distant from humans were considered to be less sentient. This has also been described in another study, 31 which highlighted what seems to be a common opinion in science — that dogs are closer to humans, as compared to mice and rats — and for this reason experiments on the latter two species are considered more acceptable.…”