Animal Welfare In Extensive Systems

There has been a lot written about animal welfare in intensive farming systems, but very little about animals reared in extensive agricultural systems. Yet these animals make up a significant proportion of the world’s farm animal population, covering a large portion of the globe. Animals kept in extensive conditions face a unique set of challenges that are vital for anyone with an interest in farm animal welfare to understand. Animal Welfare in Extensive Production Systems presents those challenges in a practical way, backed up with thoroughly referenced research. Topics covered include heat stress, water quality and availability, nutrition, predation, poisonous plants, transport, human-animal interactions, and neonatal mortality. This book is ideal for animal welfare academics, students and researchers. It can also be beneficial to students in animal science, veterinary science and agriculture and to farm industry producers and personnel. The Animal Welfare Series covers current topics in animal welfare, to further research and inform the scientific, policy-making and farming communities. 5m Books

"FAWEC - Farm Animal Welfare Education Centre"--Page 4 of cover.

This book explores the importance of good nutrition in ensuring an adequate standard of welfare for farm animals. It is often not realized that farm animals can suffer when they are fed unsuitable diets, which may be because these diets are more economic or the farmer does not know how to rectify poor nutrition. This book reveals how to recognize and deal with feeding problems in farm animals, when the animal’s behaviour is indicating a deficiency, through oral stereotypies for example. Feeding livestock in emergency situations can present special challenges, and the availability of clean and potable water, one of the essential components of life, can also be an unrecognized problem for many farm animals. Feeding farm animals effectively is rarely recognized for the major welfare issue that it is. We may assume that animals in intensive husbandry conditions have adequate feed, yet it is often too concentrated and designed primarily to immediately maximize production from the animals, in the form of growth, milk yield or reproduction. In extensive rangeland conditions adequate feed supply also cannot be assured, potentially leading to undernutrition with serious consequences for the health and even survival of livestock. This book will provide a much-needed review of the relationships between nutrition and the welfare of farm animals.

This book covers all aspects of research into the welfare of dairy, veal and beef cattle, covering behavior, nutrition and feeding, housing and management, stockmanship, and stress physiology, as well as transport and slaughter. It also offers a detailed and critical analysis of the main indicators of animal welfare and covers the main threats to animal welfare in modern cattle production systems.

This essay explores key features of the intensification of animal production in relation to animal welfare and animal ethics. It looks at some traditional ethical ideas about animal care in order to help explain why the intensification of animal production has become such a prominent social and ethical issue. It suggests that some of the standard claims made by critics of intensive animal production are seriously flawed, and proposes an alternative interpretation to account for some of the key developments in the intensification of animal production. Finally, it explores how this interpretation, if correct, leads us to a different set of actions to address animal welfare concerns in intensive production systems.

This book provides a comprehensive coverage of all aspects of the welfare of cattle. It starts with a consideration of animal welfare science and its application to the management of cattle and moves through to discussions of the challenges and opportunities for providing good welfare for cattle in farming and husbandry systems across the globe. The first section comprises three chapters that discuss the social, behavioural and physiological methods that can be used to assess welfare in cattle. The second section considers the welfare challenges of beef and dairy cattle in extensive and intensive systems. The third section details welfare challenges such as at slaughter, during handling and in the growing period and details solutions such as the use of sensors and application of animal breeding techniques. The final section addresses welfare challenges and solutions in achieving sustainability, in smallholder farms in Africa and new entrant dairying in Asia and cow shelters in India. This work makes a valuable contribution to the field of animal welfare and modern livestock farming. It is a must-read for researchers and students, veterinarians as well as industry personnel and informed farmers and producers.

Completely revised, updated and with four new chapters on sustainability, new technologies, precision agriculture and the future of animal welfare. This book is edited by an outstanding world expert on animal welfare, it emphasizes throughout the importance of measuring conditions that compromise welfare, such as lameness, heat stress, body condition, and bruises during transport.The book combines scientific information with practical recommendations for use on commercial operations and reviews practical information on livestock handling, euthanasia, slaughter, pain relief, and assessments of abnormal behavior.