Comparison among different dairy cattle welfare monitoring schemes

The study aimed to investigate the degree of agreement among three different dairy cattle welfare monitoring schemes. Animal welfare was evaluated in 17 dairy cattle farms using the following monitoring systems: 1) the Animal Needs Index 35L/2000 developed in Austria (ANI); 2) a welfare index developed in Italy by the Lombardy Extension Service (IBS); 3) the Welfare Quality® (WQ) assessment protocol for dairy cows. The ANI and IBS mainly use resource-based measures, whereas the WQ system rely on animal-based measures. As IBS is exclusively devoted to cubicle housing all the selected farms were loose housed with cubicles in the resting area to make comparisons possible. Data were collected by one trained assessor. Each farm was assessed by the three systems in the same day. The mean herd size was 93 cows (range 40÷180). Spearman rank correlation coefficients (rs) were used to determine the correlation between pairs of schemes. For each farm the time taken for the assessment was approximately 1, 1 and 5 h for ANI, IBS and WQ schemes, respectively. Total scores are reported in Table 1. Only 4 farms presented an IBS score (scores can range from 0 to 100) lower than 50. All farms presented an ANI score (scores can range from -9 to 46) greater than 21, which is considered as a fairly suitable level of welfare, with 8 farms showing a score greater than 28, which is considered as a very suitable level of welfare. According to the WQ scoring system a given farm can be assigned to four welfare categories (excellent, enhanced, acceptable and not classified. In our sample 7 farms were classified as acceptable and the remaining 10 as enhanced. A positive correlation was found between ANI and IBS total scores (rs=0.568; P=0.0174), thus ranking the farms in the same order possibly because they both rely on resource-based measures. Conversely, no correlations were found between WQ vs. ANI (rs =-0.002) and vs. IBS (rs =0.173) as WQ mostly relies on animal-based measures. We conclude that for a valid assessment of animal welfare a combination of resource and animal based measure is recommended.