AWIN Welfare assessment protocol for horses

Quality of Life within Horse Welfare Assessment Tools: Informing Decisions for Chronically Ill and Geriatric Horses

“…An additional 6 articles were identified through references, so that 14 articles were analysed, describing 11 different QoL or welfare assessment protocols. The additional articles consisted of three non-peer-reviewed documents detailing welfare assessment tools [ 66 , 67 , 69 ], two peer-reviewed articles presenting welfare assessment tools [ 59 , 61 ] and one peer-reviewed article presenting a tool to aggregate welfare parameters into scores [ 62 ]. The additional articles had not been found through the original search but only through references in full-text analysed papers, since they were either not peer-reviewed [ 66 , 67 , 69 ], used the term equid (instead of equine or horse) in abstract, title and keywords [ 59 , 62 ] or were listed as a review and therefore not found in the initial literature search but were eventually included because of the welfare assessment approach they suggest [ 61 ].…”

“…Eleven assessment tools were identified in the literature search. As displayed in Table 1 , the tools were designed for use in different contexts [ 59 , 62 ], such as welfare assessment for working horses [ 58 , 60 ], free-roaming horses [ 61 ] or horses on farms [ 57 , 64 , 66 , 67 , 70 ], as well as legislative or code-of-practice compliance [ 63 , 65 ] and veterinary practice [ 17 ]. Some of the tools were explicitly developed for the context of equine or equid welfare organisations [ 58 , 59 , 60 , 62 ], for example, to decide about the allocation of resources for welfare improvements [ 62 ].…”

“…Not all welfare assessment tools provide an explicit definition of welfare (see Table 2 ). A commonly recurring theme is welfare as a “multidimensional concept” [ 66 ] including aspects such as physical and mental health [ 59 ] without necessarily providing a hierarchy of the different aspects of welfare. Parameters of welfare risk (mainly resource- and management-based) and parameters of welfare state (mainly animal-based) are distinguished in some of the welfare assessment tools [ 53 , 61 , 62 , 64 , 66 ].…”

“…A commonly recurring theme is welfare as a “multidimensional concept” [ 66 ] including aspects such as physical and mental health [ 59 ] without necessarily providing a hierarchy of the different aspects of welfare. Parameters of welfare risk (mainly resource- and management-based) and parameters of welfare state (mainly animal-based) are distinguished in some of the welfare assessment tools [ 53 , 61 , 62 , 64 , 66 ]. The protocol presented by Harvey et al [ 61 ] is based on the Five Domains Model, e.g., [ 10 , 82 ], and outlines the importance of the mental state of the individual animal by equating it to the overall welfare state.…”

“…To our knowledge, there is no currently available assessment tool that explicitly evaluates the QoL of chronically ill or geriatric horses, whereas there are different welfare assessment tools for horses [ 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 ]. Due to the terminological and conceptual ambiguity, it is not clear, however, whether existing horse welfare, well-being or happiness assessment tools provide a useful approach for evaluating QoL.…”