ArticleFrontiers in veterinary science2021
Using Expert Elicitation to Abridge the Welfare Quality® Protocol for Monitoring the Most Adverse Dairy Cattle Welfare Impairments.
Article in Frontiers in veterinary science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Animal-based welfare indicators for dairy cows and their validity and practicality: a systematic review of the existing literature.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2024Pooled it
- First evaluation framework based on the one welfare concept in extensive broiler rearing systems.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Simplified Internal Audits of the Welfare Quality Protocol in Dairy Farms: Are They Effective in Improving Welfare Practices?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Analysing biomarkers in oral fluid from pigs: influence of collection strategy and age of the pig.Porcine health management · 2023Article
- Precision Technologies to Address Dairy Cattle Welfare: Focus on Lameness, Mastitis and Body Condition.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
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Abstract
The Welfare Quality® consortium has developed and proposed standard protocols for monitoring farm animal welfare. The uptake of the dairy cattle protocol has been below expectation, however, and it has been criticized for the variable quality of the welfare measures and for a limited number of measures having a disproportionally large effect on the integrated welfare categorization. Aiming for a wide uptake by the milk industry, we revised and simplified the Welfare Quality® protocol into a user-friendly tool for cost- and time-efficient on-farm monitoring of dairy cattle welfare with a minimal number of key animal-based measures that are aggregated into a continuous (and thus discriminative) welfare index (WI). The inevitable subjective decisions were based upon expert opinion, as considerable expertise about cattle welfare issues and about the interpretation, importance, and validity of the welfare measures was deemed essential. The WI is calculated as the sum of the severity score (i.e., how severely a welfare problem affects cow welfare) multiplied with the herd prevalence for each measure. The selection of measures (lameness, leanness, mortality, hairless patches, lesions/swellings, somatic cell count) and their severity scores were based on expert surveys (14-17 trained users of the Welfare Quality® cattle protocol). The prevalence of these welfare measures was assessed in 491 European herds. Experts allocated a welfare score (from 0 to 100) to 12 focus herds for which the prevalence of each welfare measure was benchmarked against all 491 herds. Quadratic models indicated a high correspondence between these subjective scores and the WI (
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