Animal Welfare Flashcards
What is the 2016 BVA definition of animal welfare?
“Animal welfare relates to both the physical health and mental wellbeing of the animal.”
What is a vet’s priority?
The animal’s welfare overall.
What are some roles of vets in animal welfare outside of practice?
- Advocacy and education – vets in media and public eye: vets calling for a ban on routine tail docking, influential books on welfare and ethics, tv and campaigners.
- Animal welfare research – PHDs, scholarships, research projects
- International welfare work – going overseas to help animal welfare projects and charities
- Law, legislation and policymaking – vets can be consulted when developing codes of practice.
How can animal welfare be defined using 3 elements?
Physical - is the animal physically healthy?
Mental - is the animal mentally healthy?
Naturalness - is the animal able to exhibit natural behaviours?
How can animal welfare by described using the 5 freedoms?
- Freedom form hunger and thirst
- Freedom from discomfort
- Freedom from pain, injury and disease
- Freedom to express normal behaviour
- Freedom form fear and distress
How can animal welfare be measured by inputs?
What we are providing:
- Diet
- Housing
- Social groups
- Exercise
- Health care
How can anima welfare be measured by outputs?
Animal based measures:
- Body condition score
- Lesions
- Social behaviour
- Health
Previously a focus on animal welfare came form inputs but these are not the best measures and it is now understood that output measures are better ways to measure an animal’s welfare.
What is the more recent framework of animal welfare?
The 5 domains model:
- Nutrition - enough water and food, balanced and varied diet.
- Environment - physical environment comfortable or pleasant.
- Health - healthy, fit and/or uninjured.
- Behaviour - able to express rewarding behaviours.
- Mental state - drinking pleasures, taste pleasures, chewing pleasures, satiety, physical comforts, vigour of good, health and fitness, reward, good-directed, engagement, calmness, in control, affectionate sociability, maternally rewarded, excited playfulness, sexually gratified
How is animal welfare measured in the field?
- Nutritional intakes and feed quality
- Red tractor assessments on farm
- Questioning about housing conditions in a milking herd
- Welfare assessment of a person’s home to check suitability for dog rehoming
- Welfare assessment at a zoo to check for suitable accommodation
- Body condition scoring
- Faecal worm counting to assess parasite load in a group of animals
- Stall standing index
- Incidence of aggressive behaviours between conspecifics if housed together
- Incidence of injuries
- % lameness on a farm
- General measures indicating disease presence such as measuring capillary refill time and palpations
- Hair loss assessment
- Stocking density
- Stereotypical behaviours
How is animal welfare measured in the lab?
- Measuring welfare of animals before and after being used in research, as well as during physical assessments required for research data.
- Welfare assessment on living conditions: are the enclosures large enough, are they provided with enough bedding and food to prevent stress, is there a separate area of the accommodation for them to defecate/urinate, is there stimulation and enrichment
- Measure fear response to interaction with researchers
- Amount of effort an animal would undertake to obtain a particular “reward” might indicate its relative importance to the animal
- Cortisol, corticosterone levels
- TPR values
- Dopamine levels
Distinguish animal welfare science, ethics and legislation.
What is our impact on animals = animal welfare science
How should be treat animals? = ethics
How must we treat animals? = legislation
What is farm animal assurance?
- Farm assurance is product certification for agricultural products that emphasises the principles of quality assurance.
- Farm assurance schemes include standards and certification for traceability, production methods, transport and supplies.
- All farm assurance schemes claim that they can help to ensure high standards of animal welfare, although there is great variation in these standards.
What are farm welfare assessors?
- Producers – self assessment of farm
- Assurance schemes, companies and vets
- Require: experience with the species, training in on-farm welfare assessment, inter-observer reliability assessment
- Automated welfare assessment
What is inter-observer reliability?
The extent to which 2 or more observers are observing and assessing in the same way. 2 or more observers do an assessment and then compare results. Statistical analysis to look at correlation between the observers. High correlation needed.
What is assessed at a farm?
- Incidence of mastitis
- Quality of substrate
- How slippy the floor is
- How well they are provided with water
- Body condition scores
- Lameness
- Overgrown hooves
- How dirty the animal is
- Inputs and outputs
