Dr. Robert Tremblay
Dr. Robert Tremblay
Veterinarian
Several of the codes of practice for the care and management of farm animals are currently undergoing revision or will be going through the revision process in the next few years. The process involves work by members sitting on two committees for each commodity group.
There is a scientific committee which reviews research on the recognized welfare issues and a committee that develops the code itself. According to the website of the National Farm Animal Care Council (NFACC), “The Code Development Committee and the Scientific Committee work together to develop a science-and-consensus-based Code. The result is a Code that is scientifically informed, practical, and reflects societal expectations for responsible farm animal care.”
Last year, the British veterinary journal, The Veterinary Record, published the result of a research study that tried to reach a consensus on animal welfare amongst experts. They defined experts as “someone who worked in their field of expertise for more than three years and was from the UK.” The article didn’t say whether any of those experts were farmers. Cattle, beef and dairy were considered separately. The research procedure was to generate a list of welfare issues from research that had been published or was important based on suggestions from the experts. The experts were then asked to score each of the welfare issues based on three criteria: the severity of the issue, how long the animal was likely to suffer from the issue; and the proportion of animals that were likely to experience the issue.
Each of the three criterion was scored on a scale from 1 to 6. Those total scores were then used to rank the welfare issues. Any issue with a score that totaled fewer than three was discarded. The same experts were then shown the ranking of the welfare issues and asked if they would like to see each issue ranked higher or lower.
Agreement was measured using a statistical test called kappa. The calculated kappa value or agreement across 75% of the experts was used to declare that there was consensus on the issues that had been identified. Experts then ranked each priority based on their occurrence and separately based on how severe and long-lasting they were.
Based on occurrence, here are the top six welfare priorities in dairy cows and dairy goats:
• Illness and death losses in young animals
• Inadequate pain management and more specifically, poor recognition of pain
• Inappropriate nutrition
• Production-related diseases such as lameness
• Need for better stockmanship
• Issues related to social development
The experts also ranked welfare issues for dairy and milking goats on the basis of their severity and duration:
• Inappropriate nutrition (broadly defined as a failure to feed animals ad- equately)
• Illness and death losses in young animals
• Stockmanship
• Issues related to social development
• Appropriate pain management
• Impact of infectious diseases
The welfare issues of beef cattle and sheep were grouped together. Here are the top three welfare issues based on how often they occur:
• Lack of perception of pain and pain management
• Lack of recognition of poor health
• Inadequate access to veterinary care
The experts also ranked top welfare issues on the basis of their severity and duration:
• Lack of care (no doubt related to the fact that beef cattle and sheep are often at pasture and unobserved for extended periods of time
• Lameness
Although this research data was collected entirely from people working in the UK, I found it interesting to read for two reasons. Their conclusions regarding the top welfare priorities might be quite similar to expert concerns in Canada and because of the systematic method that they used to decide that they had achieved ‘consensus’ in ranking the welfare concerns.
