Using Expert Elicitation to Abridge the Welfare Quality® Protocol for Monitoring the Most Adverse Dairy Cattle Welfare Impairments

Abstract

The Welfare Quality® consortium has developed and proposed standard protocols for monitoring farm animal welfare. The uptake of the dairy cattle protocol has been below expectation, however, and it has been criticized for the variable quality of the welfare measures and for a limited number of measures having a disproportionally large effect on the integrated welfare categorization. Aiming for a wide uptake by the milk industry, we revised and simplified the Welfare Quality® protocol into a user-friendly tool for cost- and time-efficient on-farm monitoring of dairy cattle welfare with a minimal number of key animal-based measures that are aggregated into a continuous (and thus discriminative) welfare index (WI). The inevitable subjective decisions were based upon expert opinion, as considerable expertise about cattle welfare issues and about the interpretation, importance, and validity of the welfare measures was deemed essential. The WI is calculated as the sum of the severity score (i.e., how severely a welfare problem affects cow welfare) multiplied with the herd prevalence for each measure. The selection of measures (lameness, leanness, mortality, hairless patches, lesions/swellings, somatic cell count) and their severity scores were based on expert surveys (14–17 trained users of the Welfare Quality® cattle protocol). The prevalence of these welfare measures was assessed in 491 European herds. Experts allocated a welfare score (from 0 to 100) to 12 focus herds for which the prevalence of each welfare measure was benchmarked against all 491 herds. Quadratic models indicated a high correspondence between these subjective scores and the WI (R2 = 0.91). The WI allows both numerical (0–100) as a qualitative (“not classified” to “excellent”) evaluation of welfare. Although it is sensitive to those welfare issues that most adversely affect cattle welfare (as identified by EFSA), the WI should be accompanied with a disclaimer that lists adverse or favorable effects that cannot be detected adequately by the current selection of measures.

Aiming to Improve Dairy Cattle Welfare by Using Precision Technology to Track Lameness, Mastitis, Somatic Cell Count and Body Condition Score

“…There are presently three methods for evaluating the welfare of dairy cattle, farmers ensuring responsible management in USA [19], the code in New Zealand [20], and welfare quality in Europe [21]. The latter approach has received significant criticism in a number of studies [22][23][24], which offered a number of recommendations for lowering the number of assessed parameters to get around the timeconsuming observations, which is a limitation that prevents its normal deployment in dairy farms. Along with limiting the assessment processes, the scoring methodology was also altered and made more flexible so that measures may be modified or added as considered appropriate [23].…”

“…As with the Welfare Quality® protocol, the implementation of dairy cow welfare evaluation has considerable constraints, as it is time-consuming [23] and lacks interaction with trained users on the value of various welfare criteria [104]. In addition to shortening the evaluation period, many researchers proposed changes to the calculations, such as the one described by Van Eerdenburg et al [22] for drinking water. Furthermore, the welfare calculations required more adjustable techniques, mainly for the total score [23,104].…”

How Far Are We From Data-Driven and Animal-Based Welfare Assessment? A Critical Analysis of European Quality Schemes

“…There could be several reasons for the only partial success of WQ R as a welfare labeling initiative. Probably the most notorious is the lack of transparency related to scoring aggregation algorithms and the high workload associated with the assessment (Tuyttens et al, 2021).…”

“…In addition to the incorporation of animalbased measures, the advantages of WQ R are that it has been scientifically validated (Knierim and Winckler, 2009;Temple et al, 2011) and that it can be used for multiple farm animal species including pigs and dairy cattle. Also, WQ R is possibly the most scrutinized welfare assessment protocol (Czycholl et al, 2018;Tuyttens et al, 2021) and has been widely used as a reference protocol in scientific literature. However, the extent to which various quality schemes utilize the animal-, managementand resource-based measures defined by WQ R protocols has been seldom discussed (Heinola et al, 2021).…”

What do we really know about intention in animals? A bibliometric analysis

“…Despite the interest in these methods, the impossibility of directly assessing mental states has an impact on their consideration, which affects the way in which they are studied and evaluated (Tuyttens et al, 2021) and the need to improve the feasibility, reliability and validity of these methods is regularly outlined (Broom, 2011;Tuyttens et al, 2021). This is true of human studies and therefore even more limiting for non-human animals.…”