Ranking Experts’ Preferences Regarding Measures And Methods Of Assessment Of Welfare In Dairy Herds
This study used a research method typically employed in marketing to determine preferred product traits in order to assess what aspects of cow herd health were favored measures by “animal welfare experts.” An animal welfare expert was defined as someone who conducts research and has scientific publications addressing animal welfare. The study found that lameness cases, competition for feed and water, number of freestalls per 10 cows, stereotypic behavior, body condition score, and hock lesions were the most preferred measures of cow herd health.
Article Abstract:
“Welfare in dairy herds can be addressed using differ- ent concepts. The difficulty is to extract which mea- sures are the most important to practically address wel- fare at the herd level and the methods to assess traits considered most important. Therefore, the preferences of 24 acknowledged European welfare experts were ranked regarding 70 measures suitable to assess dairy cattle welfare at herd level using the Adaptive Conjoint Analysis (ACA; Sawtooth Software, Inc., Sequim, WA) technique. The experts were selected on the basis of 3 criteria: at least 5 yr experience in animal welfare research; recent scientific publications in the field of animal welfare; and, at the most, 3 animal species in- cluding dairy cattle as their field of expertise.”
“The 70 traits were ranked by using the median ACA question- naire utility scores and the range between the answers of the 24 experts. A high utility score with a low range between the answers of the experts was considered as suitable to assess welfare at farm level. Measures meet- ing these criteria were prevalence of lameness cases (107.3 ± 11.7), competition for feed and water (96.4 ± 13.9), and number of freestalls per 10 cows (84.8 ± 13.3). Based on the utility score alone, these former measures were replaced by stereotypic behavior (111.7 ± 17.1), prevalence of lameness cases (107.3 ± 11.7), body condition score (108.0 ± 18.9), and hock lesions (104.7 ± 16.1)…”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21700027