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This paper outlines the history and development of research in the area of animal welfare as reflected in the 100 yr that the Journal of Dairy Science has been published. The first paper using the term “animal welfare” was published in 1983; since then (to May 2017), 244 papers that reflect growing interest regarding how farm animals are cared for have been published. Much of the scientific work to date has focused on issues related to cow health, such as lameness, and methodologically many papers use behavioral measures. In addition to this science-based research, the journal has taken on the role of publishing work of social scientists that addresses the role of the human factors relating to animal welfare, including research on citizen, consumer, and farmer attitudes toward welfare issues. We call for further research focused on societal perspectives and for new biological research focused on developing issues, such as cow–calf separation and pasture access.
This review outlines the history and development of scholarly work on the topic of animal welfare as reflected in the 100 yr that the Journal of Dairy Science (JDS) has been published. Coverage of this topic has expanded dramatically over the past 30 yr, with the greatest expansion occurring very recently. Animal welfare is an area of application rather than a discipline and is amenable to a variety of disciplinary approaches, including physiology, genetics, nutrition, sociology, and so on. Animal behavior has been an especially useful disciplinary approach to welfare questions, but behavioral studies also address more basic issues (e.g., the nature of social relationships) and practical issues (e.g., heat detection) that are not related to animal welfare. In the current paper we focus on animal welfare but highlight how the field of animal behavior has played a role in finding solutions to improve dairy cattle welfare.
In the sections that follow, we define what we mean by animal welfare and the types of concerns that it encompasses, provide a brief history of animal welfare as a social movement, and focus on how animal welfare issues have been addressed within JDS, identifying how far we have come and key papers where possible. We end with our vision for how research in dairy welfare will continue to develop in the years to come.
What is Animal Welfare?
The study of welfare is focused on improving the lives of animals, but exactly what this means has changed over the past century. Traditionally, a good life has been associated with good health and appropriate levels of production, but scholars working on health or production might not think of themselves as working on welfare. Although both health and production are associated with good biological functioning on the part of the animal, sometimes the methods used to address health and production goals may introduce other types of welfare concerns.
A more modern view of welfare concerns how the animal feels (
); this view would support changing procedures to minimize negative affective states (e.g., pain) and promote positive states (e.g., pleasure). The main challenge with this approach is scientific, and much research has been devoted to developing and validating methods to assess emotional states in animals (
). Some authors have also argued that allowing animals to live reasonably natural lives (e.g., providing the ability to express natural behaviors such as drinking milk through a nipple in calves) is also an important dimension to animal welfare, explaining why some standards require access to more natural environments (e.g., pasture) or the ability to perform key behaviors (e.g., the cow nursing her calf).
In 1997, David Fraser and colleagues published a conceptual paper calling for the integration of all 3 approaches (biological functioning, natural behavior, and affective states), arguing that welfare problems can emerge in any of these 3 areas and that the best practices will address all 3 areas of concern (
, where it was argued, for example, that allowing cows to seek shade on a hot day (natural behavior) will help prevent the cow from feeling uncomfortably hot (affective state) and reduce the health and production risks associated with heat stress (biological functioning). According to this framework, it would be misguided to address one type of welfare concern (e.g., high rates of enteric and respiratory infections in dairy calves—a biological functioning concern) by imposing a solution that introduces new welfare concerns around natural living and affective state (e.g., the use of individual housing that prevents natural interactions and play).
Animal welfare is an ethical concept and is subject to societal input. Progress on welfare relies on science, in part to provide evidence that can aid in the process of consensus building between the various stakeholders, but this scientific work must not occur in a vacuum. The science should instead be grounded in an understanding of societal values that help identify issues and anticipate objections to new practices (
Criticisms relating to the standard industry practices associated with the care and handling of farm animals first entered the mainstream media in the mid-1960s following publication of the book Animal Machines (
). This book described housing and production practices for laying hens, broiler birds, and veal calves and highlighted the unnaturalness (i.e., lack of sunshine, fresh air, and space) of these systems. The negative reaction by the British public motivated the UK government to commission the report titled “Report of the Technical Committee to Enquire into the Welfare of Animals Kept Under Intensive Livestock Husbandry Systems” (
. This report argued that animals should have the freedom “to stand up, lie down, turn around, groom themselves and stretch their limbs” and that many of the standard systems for rearing farm animals were morally unacceptable.
): (1) freedom from thirst and hunger; (2) freedom from discomfort; (3) freedom from pain, injury, and disease; (4) freedom to express normal behavior; and (5) freedom from fear and distress. Similar events have taken place in other countries. Most notably, Sweden passed animal welfare laws in 1988 effectively banning zero-grazing systems for dairy cattle (
). The European Union has promoted farm animal welfare, announcing within its first directive in 1991 that, among other things, focus must be placed on care and housing of dairy calves (for additional discussion see
), passed to protect livestock during transport to slaughter, required that after 28 h of travel in the United States by rail, steam, sail, or “vessels of any description,” livestock must be unloaded and provided feed, water, and a resting area for a minimum of 5 consecutive hours before resuming transport. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (
). More recently, a number of farm animal welfare laws have been enacted at the state level within the United States. The first of these was enacted in Florida in 2008, resulting in a ban on gestation stalls for sows. Since then, 9 states have effectively banned a variety of standard industry practices. A particularly well-known example is the 2008 California ballot initiative (Proposition 2) that, effective January 1, 2015, required that “calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens, and pregnant pigs be confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs, and turn around freely.” The passing of Proposition 2 in California resulted in additional consequences. Senate bill 135, dated October 11, 2009, made an amendment to section 597n of the penal code, relating to animal abuse, that specifically banned tail docking of cattle (
These types of legislative changes have driven industry-led responses, including the development of guidance documents for farmers and verification procedures to provide assurance that farms are meeting these guidelines. In Canada this process has been led by the Dairy Farmers of Canada and Canada's National Farm Animal Care Committee (
). The US counterpart was led by the National Milk Producers Federation, who published the first version of the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) program in 2009; this document has gone through 2 substantive revisions since then (
). Whether these industry-led approaches will provide the necessary assurances to the public is unknown. However, as we have previously highlighted (see
), these types of standards are likely to be challenged in at least 2 ways: (1) there will likely be pressure from within the industry to have standards sufficiently lax to enable almost all farms to comply but, (2) there will likely be external pressure to maintain a supply chain that does not include bad actors (see
states that it has “zero tolerance for any act of animal cruelty” and requires “compliance with codes/standards for proper animal care and handling.” Saputo Inc. also calls on the industry to eliminate or modify routine management practices that are unnecessary or cause pain and makes specific reference to tail docking and the use of pain mitigation when dehorning or disbudding.
ANIMAL WELFARE WITHIN JDS
We conducted a systematic search of the published literature addressing animal welfare in JDS using Web of Science to search for the specific keywords “animal” and “welfare” or “animal” and “well-being” in the title, abstract, or key words of published articles and reviews from 1917 until May 2017: SO = (JOURNAL OF DAIRY SCIENCE) AND TS = ((animal AND (wellbeing OR well-being OR “well being”) OR (animal welfare)). This search identified 244 papers; 228 papers were identified using the search term “animal” and “welfare,” and an additional 16 papers were identified when “animal well-being” was included. Although the current review is focused on publications appearing in JDS, much research on the welfare of dairy animals also appears in other journals, most notably Animal Welfare and Applied Animal Behaviour Science. We refer interested readers to these and other journals for additional papers in this subject area.
The timeline provided in AppendixTable A1 highlights some of the key papers in relation to key events that have helped shape the field of animal welfare. The terms “animal” and “welfare” first appeared in JDS in 1983 in an Our Industry Today article authored by the noted researcher Jack
) are still recommended reading, in part because they provide a clear list of welfare research topics, many of which are still relevant today.
In the 1990s JDS published very little on the topic of animal welfare, but the relevant number of publications has increased rapidly since the turn of the new millennium (Figure 1). By 2009 a total of 50 papers on some aspect of dairy welfare had been published. By 2012, 100 papers had been published, and as of May 2017, 244 papers had been published.
Figure 1The number of papers published on the topic of animal welfare as reflected in the 100 yr that the Journal of Dairy Science (JDS) has been published (1917–May 2017) with the words “animal” and “welfare” or “animal” and “well-being” in the title, abstract, or key words. Results are shown by 5-yr periods (i.e., 1917–1922, 1923–1927, and so on). The first paper meeting these search criteria appeared in 1983; a total of 244 papers have appeared in JDS as of the time this review was written.
To illustrate the variety of issues and methods addressed in these 244 papers, we generated a word cloud illustrating the most common words that appeared in these papers (Figure 2). As discussed above, behavioral studies have played a key role in welfare research, so it is not surprising that “behavior” is the largest word in the cloud and that words describing specific behaviors (lying, feed, and locomotion) are also prominent. Also, given that good health has long been considered an important element of good welfare, it not surprising to see that the word “health” is larger than any of the other issue-type words appearing. This also explains why related words (e.g., lameness, disease, mastitis, lesions, prevalence, clinical) are also prominent.
Figure 2A word cloud generated using the titles, abstracts, and key words of the 244 papers resulting from our search of papers published in the Journal of Dairy Science between 1983 and the time this review was written (May 2017). The cloud shows the 100 most commonly appearing words related to animal welfare; those appearing in larger type are used more frequently. The most common word was “behavior” (appearing 334 times), and the least common word was “weaning” (appearing just 28 times).
Although the word “animal welfare” is used only in more recent papers, dairy scientists have long been interested in maintaining and improving animal health, even though this has not necessarily been explicitly linked to welfare. Using the same search methodology described earlier, we found that the first paper to use the term “health” appeared in JDS in 1945 (
. Only more recently have authors specified a link between good health and good welfare. The first time “animal” and “welfare” or “animal” and “well-being” appeared in our search was in
. These 2 terms have since appeared together in a total of 118 papers (as of May 2017), suggesting that a more explicit linkage is now important.
Affective States as Welfare Concerns
Welfare often emphasizes the animal's affective state (including negative experiences such as fear, pain, and hunger). Pain appears in our word cloud, as do the painful procedures dehorning and disbudding as well as painful ailments such as lameness, injuries, and dystocia. The first paper using the word “pain” appeared in JDS in 1999 in a paper related to mastitis (
); in this case the authors were using clinical signs of pain as an outcome measure for their study, but they clearly link infection to pain. Earlier papers may have discussed pain in the body of the paper even though the word did not appear in the sections of the paper that were covered by our search criteria. For example, the first paper with the word “dehorning” appeared in 1994 (
). These authors did not use “pain” in the title, abstract, or key words but did discuss pain in relation to studies on humans. Pain is now recognized as an important issue in dairy cattle welfare—for example, as related to disbudding (
). Since 1999 more than 70 papers using the word “pain” have been published in JDS.
Another affective state with relatively unambiguous welfare connotations is fear. The word “fear” fails to appear in the word cloud, showing that little research has been published on this topic. Indeed, our search found only 13 papers using this term in JDS. Of these, the first published was titled “Discrimination of People by Dairy Cows Based on Handling” (
. The ideas that animal handling methods may contribute to fearfulness and that fear responses can be used to improve handling procedures are important for JDS to consider.
Other negative affective states are considered in a few papers, although connotations for animal welfare are not always clear. For example, the term “hunger” first appears in a paper in 1971, but this study (“Hormones and Amino Acids as Possible Factors in Control of Hunger and Satiety in Sheep”;
) did not specifically consider hunger as a negative emotional state or its relevance to animal welfare. More recently, hunger has been treated as an important welfare concern, with a special focus on problems associated with underfeeding of the preweaned calf (reviewed by
Although much of the welfare-relevant work on affective states has focused on negative states such as those discussed above, more recent work in the field has also considered positive emotional states (for review see
). Although play is a behavior rather than an emotional state, many have argued that the presence of play is indicative of a positive emotional state. Play is more common in young animal than in adults, and papers published to date on play have all focused on calves. For example, a recent JDS paper from the Czech Republic (“The Effect of Age at Separation from the Dam and Presence of Social Companions on Play Behavior and Weight Gain in Dairy Calves”;
) showed that play behavior is more common when calves are housed socially versus individually, suggesting that social housing allows for more positive affective states in these animals. We encourage more work on positive states in the years to come.
The term “stress” has some relevance to animal welfare. For example, painful experiences are often accompanied by characteristic physiological responses (e.g., the spike in serum cortisol typically observed in the hours after disbudding;
). However, physiological stress responses can accompany neutral or even positive experiences, making it difficult to draw clear welfare inferences from these physiological responses. More than 700 papers using the word “stress” have appeared in JDS, but many of these did not explicitly address welfare. We found only 37 papers with both “stress” and “animal welfare”; the first was a review by
titled “Integration of Metabolism and Intake Regulation: A Review Focusing on Periparturient Animals.” The first empirical paper using these terms, published in 2002 (
, is natural living; this includes the animal's ability to access reasonably natural environments and to perform natural behaviors that they are motivated to perform. In many ways this is the most problematic of the 3 spheres. Some authors argue that aspects of natural living are inherent to definitions of a good life in animals (e.g.,
). The natural criterion also may seem awkward for those who see their responsibility as maintaining a managed system rather than a natural one, including the protection of animals from natural risks such as predation, parasite infection, and climatic extremes. That said, concerns about naturalness are deeply rooted in traditional thinking about dairy systems. For example, some of the earliest papers in JDS addressed the issue of providing calves more naturalistic opportunities to ingest milk. In the words of
Factors affecting the passage of liquids into the rumen of the dairy calf. I. Method of administering liquids: Drinking from open pail verses sucking through a rubber nipple.
, “The unthrifty appearance commonly observed in young dairy calves in modern dairy herds has been attributed, in many cases, to the deviation from ‘nature's way’ of feeding.” We found only 18 papers with both “natural*” and “animal welfare/animal wellbeing”; the first time that these 2 terms were mentioned together was in a review article by
titled “Feeding Behavior of Dairy Cattle.” As we argue below, public conceptions of welfare often focus more on natural living aspects, and we hope that future JDS publications will increasingly consider these measures.
To some degree, the presence of abnormal behaviors, including the repetitive and apparently functionless stereotypic behaviors, can be seen as the antithesis of the natural living ideal. Thus, what is unnatural serves to remind us of what is natural, and it is sometimes argued that abnormal behaviors are the result of housing animals in unnatural environments that fail to meet their needs (
). A few papers published in JDS have addressed abnormal (n = 3) and stereotypic (n = 6) behaviors. One example, authored by a group of Dutch researchers, examined risk factors for nonnutritive oral behaviors (e.g., tongue rolling) on commercial veal farms (
In addition to considering the literature from the perspective of the 3 spheres, we can consider papers on an issue-by-issue basis (e.g., overstocking). The list of potential welfare issues to be considered is long, but relatively few specific issues have been addressed in more than just a handful of papers in JDS. A few of the best-researched examples have been featured in curated “top 10” lists of papers appearing in the “Collections” section of the JDS website (http://www.journalofdairyscience.org/collections). Specifically regarding animal welfare, collections are currently available featuring disbudding and pain management for calves (the first published being
). We encourage future additions to the collections on welfare-relevant topics, including limit feeding of calves, social housing for calves, heat stress for lactating cows, and pasture access for cows, to name a few.
Social Science Contributions
Animal welfare is an important social concern and one of several issues (e.g., environmental, social justice) that need to be addressed to keep industry practices in line with evolving community standards. Unlike some areas of dairy science in which only scientific expertise is required, socially mandated research requires input and interplay between the science and the society that frames the issues. Sometimes this input can happen informally, via discussions with neighbors and others, but a more systematic approach is to turn the social questions into an important research agenda in their own right. Research undertaken in the social sciences can aid us in understanding the attitudes of different stakeholders, including people who work within the dairy industry (e.g., farmers, veterinarians, dairy industry specialists) and those who are not affiliated with the industry (e.g., the customer who buys milk at the grocery store, the neighbor to the dairy). Research in social sciences allows us to identify contentious topics as well as areas of agreement and thus plays a role in efforts to harmonize industry practices with societal expectations (
). Journal of Dairy Science has shown remarkable openness in publishing work using social science methodologies. Indeed, the word cloud includes the term “attitudes,” illustrating the volume of work that has been published describing stakeholder views relevant to animal welfare. This work is still very recent. The first example appeared in 2008; this study described the reactions of citizens in a Vermont community in which a local dairy farm had recently expanded from about 225 cows to 684 cows (
). This study was important in that it documented community concerns associated with large farms, including perceived negative effects on the environment (including water quality) and animal welfare. This type of research can help identify needs for future research that addresses these concerns.
One example where JDS has made a particular contribution is in the area of pasture access. Several social science papers have shown that the public considers access to pasture to be important to the welfare of dairy cows both in the United States (i.e.,
). This same work showed that farmers perceive a lack of ability to provide pasture to their cows—for example, because of a lack of land or because of unfavorable climatic conditions. Journal of Dairy Science has published a series of studies showing that cows preferentially use pasture at night but stay indoors during the day (e.g.,
Effects of providing total mixed rations indoors and on pasture on the behavior of lactating dairy cattle and their preference to be indoors or on pasture.
). One reason why cows prefer to remain indoors during the day is that higher energy total mixed diets are typically provided indoors, and feed intake is highest during daylight hours (
). These studies illustrate the potential of hybrid systems that allow cows to go to pasture but also maintain access to a well-designed barn and mixed ration. This serves as an example of the how research in the biological and social sciences can work in harmony.
Scientific work of this nature may not always adequately address the societal concern, and societal concerns can evolve just as quickly as the science. Thus, the science that leads to developing new approaches needs to happen together with the social science research that seeks to document and understand the underlying concerns. Ideally, this may form a type of feedback loop going from the social science to the science and back again.
HOW FAR HAVE WE COME?
To get a sense of the progress we have seen in animal welfare research published in JDS, we return to research priorities summarized in the pioneering papers of
lists several items in his “Future Research and Solutions” section (p. 66), including confinement housing, (i.e., concrete flooring), different stall types, overstocking and group size, and, more broadly, cow comfort in different housing systems. More specific concerns included the use of crowd gates in the milking parlor and behavioral problems such as cross-sucking in calves.
The issue of cow comfort has received considerable coverage in JDS. This line of research has addressed topics such as stocking density (as mentioned above), the effects of various flooring options on cow health (
). We note that little work has contrasted cow comfort in different housing systems, but we also caution readers that well-replicated studies assessing system-level differences are difficult to achieve. We also could find no research published in JDS on the welfare effects of crowd gates in the milking parlor, although there has been research on how best to manage cow flow in automatic milking systems (for review see
, argued that individual housing is an appropriate solution to this problem due in part to perceived health benefits. We view individual housing as more of a “Band-Aid” solution (i.e., preventing the expression of the behavior but not the underlying motivation). More recent work has shown multiple problems associated with individual housing for calves and no added benefit in terms of health when compared with calves housed in small groups (for review see
). Other work published in JDS has also shown that the motivation to suck (including on pen mates, pen fixtures, and so on) is the result of underfeeding and unnatural feeding methods (i.e., buckets versus a teat;
provides a summary of welfare issues (pages 2221–2223). This list includes concerns regarding increasing farm size and the resulting lack of individualized care. A recent review argued that there is no clear 1-way relationship between farm size and welfare (
), it was found that larger Australian herds had better trained workers (presumably favorable for welfare) but were also more likely to overstock their cows (presumably to the detriment of the cows). As summarized by
, the cow-to-worker ratio is typically higher on larger farms, but “farm workers tend to be better paid, better trained, more specialized, and more satisfied” (page 5448) on these farms, perhaps compensating for the reduction in individualized care. Public concerns about cattle welfare are often rooted in the value of individualized care (
included restriction of movement and social deprivation, as illustrated in the following quote regarding the housing of milk-fed heifers and veal calves: “Continued confinement in small crates in which they cannot walk, run around, or interact freely with others is ethically questionable” (page 2222). As we described above, much work has now addressed the welfare issues associated with individual housing for calves.
Unfortunately, relatively little has been published in JDS specifically addressing the welfare issues associated with other types of confinement in dairy cattle. One obvious question is how long periods of housing in tiestalls may affect cow welfare. We suggest that many issues may be inherent to long periods of movement restriction, even if some improvements can be achieved by changes in tiestall design (
). The phasing out of tiestalls has already begun in some regions; for example, Norway banned new construction of this popular housing type in 2004, and a complete ban takes effect in 2023. The welfare impact of other types of restriction, including routine restriction of cows in head lockers for management and health procedures, is largely unknown.
is that of cow–calf separation. Unfortunately, we could not find a single empirical paper published in JDS that directly addressed the welfare issues associated with this practice. This is an unfortunate gap given that we now know that that separation of cow and calf is an important area of public concern (
was clearly also concerned about a lack of naturalness and negative affective states. More progress has been made on the biological issues, perhaps because welfare improvements in this domain often are associated with production benefits. For example, reductions in lameness benefit both the cow and the farmer's bottom line. The lack of progress on issues relating to naturalness and affective states may be attributable to a lack of research funding for this type of work. As noted by
, “very little organized U.S. research on dairy animal welfare is underway”; the same could be said of the situation today. A significant portion of agricultural research is sponsored by corporations and thus is more focused on production and product testing than on general benefit to the dairy industry or broader society (see
Our review shows that of the 9,190 publications with US-based corresponding authors since 1983, only 0.7% address the topic of animal welfare. In contrast, of the 7,576 publications with non-US-based corresponding authors over the same time period, 2.3% address the topic of welfare and a greater than 3-fold higher proportion of publications related to animal welfare. Thus, scientific guidance on the topic of animal welfare in the United States is largely dependent on the research and advice provided by scientists working outside of the United States (including the authors of the current review).
From the section above we can conclude that there is some basis for pride in the progress made within the journal to address priority issues in dairy welfare but that there are also areas where little or no progress has been made. We turn to some of these in the next section.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Below we speculate on what the future may hold for dairy cattle welfare research. We have organized this section in terms of the time horizon (short, medium, and long term) over which we believe that most progress will occur. Whether acceptable solutions are found over these periods will depend on resources, including funding, the availability of qualified individuals who are able to take a leadership role, and the continued interest and enthusiasm of stakeholders, including the public, producers, and industry professionals.
Short Term
In the short term (over the next decade especially), the dairy industry must work to implement proven science-based welfare solutions. This includes implementing pain control protocols for procedures such as dehorning (
There is also an immediate need to develop a scientific basis for new policies and practices regarding other well-recognized welfare issues. This includes the care, handling, and slaughter of surplus calves (predominantly bull calves) and downer cows. In some cases, we require new research (e.g., to identify practices that result in better recovery by downer cows; see
). In other cases, the development of systems that help prevent the problem are required (e.g., the use of sexed semen for the production of replacement heifers and cross-breeding with beef breeds to create high-value calves that can be reared humanely for beef; see
In the short term there is also a need to study not just the dairy animal but also the humans who decide how cattle are to be cared for (farmers), those who advise farmers (e.g., veterinarians and dairy industry specialists), those who buy the dairy products (consumers), and those who ultimately decide what farming systems and associated management practices will be tolerated within their community (citizens; e.g.,
). This focus on the social as well as the natural sciences has been helpful for other areas of dairy science; in particular, we note the work on understanding barriers to changing practices in relation to mastitis control (e.g.,
). Specifically, we hope that within 10 yr JDS will have a section devoted to work in the social sciences that embraces all aspects of dairy production.
Medium Term
Over the medium term (likely continuing for at least the next 20 yr), the dairy scientist community will continue to develop research-based solutions to health issues that affect many animals and cause considerable suffering. Key examples include the high rates of disease in transition cows and milk-fed calves. One special concern is lameness in dairy cattle because of the high prevalence and long duration of cases as well as the pain that cows experience. Indeed, we call for more research to better understand the effects of other important dairy cattle diseases, particularly during the transition from pregnancy to lactation, including mastitis and metritis, and the pain and malaise that affected cattle feel (
). We also see much room for the social sciences to help identify barriers to implementing proven welfare solutions on farms with regards to culling decisions and timely euthanasia.
Long Term
Over the longer term (likely continuing for at least the next 50 yr), scientists and professionals working within the dairy industry must also show the courage and innovation necessary to develop solutions that address societal expectations. We suggest that there will be at least 2 urgent priorities for the development and implementation of welfare-friendly practices: pasture access and cow–calf rearing.
As we outlined previously, we have found that both farmers and people outside of the dairy industry see pasture access as an important component of high-welfare dairy systems (
). Moreover, what is best from the cow's perspective may not always agree with public or even industry perspectives, so having a research basis that underpins recommendations is especially important. For example, although some may feel that pasture is always better for cows, research has shown that cows will often choose to come inside a well-designed and well-managed barn, especially to avoid direct sunlight when temperatures are high (
). Thus, we see the need for new research on systems based on free-choice access between well-managed indoor and outdoor facilities. These will allow cows to vary their choices depending on conditions and will allow different individuals to express their own idiosyncratic preferences. We also call for new work examining a range of different types of outdoor access. We have found that cows will often choose to consume a well-formulated mixed diet inside the barn rather than graze (
), meaning that outdoor systems may not need to be grass based or could take advantage of hardy, slow-growing grass varieties designed to provide a comfortable lying and standing surface rather than an important source of nutrients.
There appears to be little public support for the standard management practice of cow–calf separation (United States:
). Very little research is available to either justify this practice or provide alternatives. The few studies to date suggest that the practice increases the risk of postpartum disease in early lactation (e.g.,
Cow–calf relations. 2: The effect of 0 vs. 5 days suckling on behaviour, milk production and udder health of cows in different stabling. Report No. 678.
National Institute of Animal Science,
Foulum, Denmark1990
). Moreover, the available health data indicate that despite early separation of cow and calf, morbidity and mortality rates are high for both the calf (see review by
). On the basis of this evidence, critics could argue that separation may be detrimental to the health and welfare of both the cow and the calf. Some initial guidance on possible solutions may be found in the few studies done on the use of nurse cows (e.g.,
) on keeping calves with access to the dam and a supplementary milk supply. Given the complexity of the issue, including the difficulty in developing practical methods that are economically sustainable for farmers, much new research will be required.
CONCLUSIONS
Animal welfare is a relatively new area of application; the first papers directly focused on this topic were published in JDS in 1983. Over the last 30 yr, JDS publications have made important contributions to animal welfare issues such as tail docking, providing calves more milk, and pain mitigation during dehorning, but little has been published on other important issues (e.g., cow–calf separation). The field of animal behavior has played a central role in many of these studies. Animal welfare is a socially mandated science requiring input from all stakeholders, including the public. Research in the social sciences can help document the shared and divergent values of different stakeholders, beliefs regarding the available evidence, and barriers to implementing change, all of which are needed to develop practices that resonate with societal values.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special thank you to Alexi Thompson [Animal Welfare Program, University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, BC, Canada] for help with literature searches, the development of the figures, and comments on the manuscript. We also thank current and former students Christine Sumner (Animal Welfare Program, UBC) and Katelyn Mills (Animal Welfare Program, UBC) as well as Jesse Robbins (Animal Welfare Program, UBC), Jeffrey Spooner (Ottawa, ON, Canada), Katy Proudfoot (The Ohio State University, Columbus), and Trevor DeVries (University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada) for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. The authors are supported by Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Industrial Research Chair Program with industry contributions from the Dairy Farmers of Canada (Ottawa, ON, Canada), British Columbia Dairy Association (Burnaby, BC Canada), Westgen Endowment Fund (Milner, BC, Canada), Intervet Canada Corporation (Kirkland, QC, Canada), Novus International Inc. (Oakville, ON, Canada), Zoetis (Kirkland, QC, Canada), BC Cattle Industry Development Fund (Kamloops, BC, Canada), Alberta Milk (Edmonton, AB, Canada), Valacta (St. Anne-de-Bellevue, QC, Canada), and CanWest DHI (Guelph, ON, Canada).
APPENDIX
Table A1A timeline of the key contributions to the field of animal welfare
Date
Milestone
Reference
1939
Wise and Anderson in their introduction state, “The unthrifty appearance commonly observed in young dairy calves in modern dairy herds has been attributed, in many cases, to the deviation from ‘nature's way’ of feeding.”
Factors affecting the passage of liquids into the rumen of the dairy calf. I. Method of administering liquids: Drinking from open pail verses sucking through a rubber nipple.
Animal Machines criticizes standard industry practices associated with the care and handling of farm animals; this criticism enters the UK mainstream media.
Effects of providing total mixed rations indoors and on pasture on the behavior of lactating dairy cattle and their preference to be indoors or on pasture.
Cow–calf relations. 2: The effect of 0 vs. 5 days suckling on behaviour, milk production and udder health of cows in different stabling. Report No. 678.
National Institute of Animal Science,
Foulum, Denmark1990
Factors affecting the passage of liquids into the rumen of the dairy calf. I. Method of administering liquids: Drinking from open pail verses sucking through a rubber nipple.
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