A new, practical animal welfare assessment for Dutch dairy farmers.

The results of three Dutch animal welfare assessment protocols were compared with a modified Welfare Quality® assessment protocol (WQ) on 60 dairy farms in the Netherlands, representing farms with good, moderate and poor welfare, as determined by their local veterinarians. It was one of our objectives to determine if welfare indicators that were easier and faster to measure would correlate with more time consuming animal-based measurements of the modified WQ. Several of the indicators of the modified WQ correlated well with those of three other welfare assessment protocols, that are used in th... Mehr ...