Putting a stop to pain and distress in farm animals

3 August 2012

The Veterinary School has worked with the Tubney Charitable Trust to tackle the problems of lameness and feather pecking.

Becky Whay

Chronic animal welfare problems on UK farms significantly depress production. For example, lameness causes suffering in up to a third of UK dairy cattle at any one time and leads to a loss of animals through early culling, inefficient milk production, and frustration and stress for dairy farmers. Feather pecking in laying hens also causes pain, is found in almost all flocks and costs the industry over £12 million per year in mortality and lost production alone.

Dr Becky Whay, Dr Claire Weeks and their teams from the Veterinary School have worked with the Tubney Charitable Trust to tackle these problems. First, the project teams collated scientific information about the risk factors that influence these painful conditions. Both projects then, crucially, developed and tested the best methods of helping farmers to implement this knowledge on farm. The involvement of dairy companies (MilkLink, OMSCo, Long Clawson, Dairy Crest), laying hen producers (Noble Foods, Stonegate, Country Fresh Pullets) industry bodies and farm assurance schemes (RSPCA Freedom Food, Soil Association, Assured Dairy Farms, BEIC) was essential for success. In partnership, the projects developed new approaches that are now showing real results on farm.

It is not enough for us, as scientists, to know how to manage cattle lameness; we have to find approaches that allow farmers to do it for themselves.

Dr Becky Whay

In both situations, practical strategies for commercial farms were devised, and the effectiveness of these strategies was tested on treatment farms (which received ongoing advice and support) by comparing the reduction in lameness or feather pecking with that observed on control farms (which were simply monitored). For dairy cows, the initial mean prevalence of lameness on the 227 farms involved was 37%; at the project’s conclusion over 4,800 fewer cows were observed to be lame. For laying hens, the more interventions that were implemented on the 100 farms involved, the greater the reduction in feather pecking observed.

Since different farmers adopted different strategies our expertise in a multi-level statistics is now enabling us to establish which interventions were most useful. We also work with economists to ensure the economic gains associated with welfare improvement outweigh any additional costs of adopting the interventions, thereby helping to secure food supplies for the future.