Data di Pubblicazione:
2014
Citazione:
Transect walks : method sensitivity for on-farm welfare evaluation in turkeys / T.T. Negrao Watanabe, V. Ferrante, C. Tremolada, L. Ferrari, S. Lolli, R. Rizzi, I. Estevez. ((Intervento presentato al 3. convegno AWIN annual conference tenutosi a Prague nel 2014.
Abstract:
There is increasing consumer demands for livestock and poultry products that meet minimum animal
welfare standards during their production cycle. Additionally, a growing number of farmers are aware
about full compliance with the animal welfare standards that could play an important economic role in
commercial intensive productions. Indeed, animal welfare assessment protocols have meaningful effects
to promote and guarantee the on-farm safeguard animal standards. Transect walks method appeared to
provide a practical approach to welfare assessment in broilers farms. Because of the similarities of meat
poultry production, this method could be considered a reasonable approach for turkey welfare
evaluation in terms of time demands, within costs and feasibility. The aim of this study was to
determine the sensitivity of this method at 3 commercial turkey farms with similar facilities (Animal
Welfare Indicators project, FP7-KBBE-2010-4). In this study, 10 commercial female-turkey flocks (6
houses with identical management), ranging from 3,212 to 6,000 birds and belonging to the same
company were evaluated one week before slaughter. On turkey farms, walking through the house is a
routine daily procedure to check the health status of the birds. Two previously trained assessors in
performing the transect methodology and properly assessing the selected indicators, evaluated each
paired house sequentially and independently within the same day by walking through predefined
transect bands (1 to 4) in random order. The animal-based indicators considered were: immobility,
lameness, wounds and featherless. The statistical model used was GLM in the GENMOD procedure
(SAS V9). The results showed that this welfare assessment method highlights even small variation
among houses for the considered variables. In fact, there were significant difference across houses
(P=0.0021, P=0.0006, P=0.0081 and P=0.0003) for all the evaluated indicators respectively. Differences
across observers were detected for wounds and featherless (P<0.0001). These results may be due to the
difficulties in assessing equally these parameters while walking. On the contrary, lameness, probably the
most important welfare problem in meat poultry, showed a good concordance between observers (P=
0.361). These preliminary findings suggest that this new approach has potential as a tool for on-farm
welfare evaluation, which may be worthwhile to be further developed.
Tipologia IRIS:
14 - Intervento a convegno non pubblicato
Elenco autori:
T.T. Negrao Watanabe, V. Ferrante, C. Tremolada, L. Ferrari, S. Lolli, R. Rizzi, I. Estevez
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