Perspective Chapter: Exploring Multifaceted Approaches to Enhance Dairy Cow Welfare

Abstract

This chapter covers welfare issues observed worldwide in dairy cattle farms and outlines as its main objective, welfare indicators, including animal as well as resource-based concerns. Appropriate microclimate conditions and some useful indicators that can be numerically evaluated are highlighted e.g., body hygiene score, gait score, and dairy cow pain scale. As in other species, the ultimate goal of welfare auditing in cows is to use integrative systems or protocols, including those most relevant to the aforementioned indicators, and in particular numerical integrative ones, allowing even for the comparison of different farm conditions or husbandry systems in terms of overall herd welfare. Future challenges for improving cows’ welfare are the expansion of publicly available databases resulting in different in-field assessments worldwide, the widespread use of environmental enrichment and smart farming technologies such as automated monitoring systems and virtual fencing, as well as refining the assessment protocols and using dedicated apps to make implementation faster.