Veterinarians deliver a key role in safeguarding health and welfare:
- Herd/flock health: Measure/Manage/Monitor
- A life worth living and welfare outcomes
The vet cannot be an expert in all areas related to
the running of a farm unit, but is ideally positioned as a coordinator
of this process, with an overview of animal health and welfare, food
production and environmental management. Therefore a key role
of the vet is to help to form a cohesive farm policy
alongside other specialist farm advisors, balancing animal health and
welfare, economic and environmental considerations.
Herd health management (HHM) involves the delivery of a more coordinated
approach with a critical process of PRIORITIZATION of management interventions.
HHM has been defined as 'a method to optimise health, welfare and production in a
population of animals through the systematic analysis of relevant data and through
regular objective observations of the cows and their environment, such that informed,
timely decisions are made to adjust and improve herd management over time'(Green, 2012).
A cycle of 'Measure/Manage/Monitor' characterises this whole-herd approach and by taking ownership of
the process through an effective vet–farmer partnership.
The widely recognised 'Five Freedoms' developed in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s,
help to encapsulate society’s expectations for the conditions animals should experience
when under human control, namely:
However, the aspiration for kept animals to achieve a 'good life' beyond just a 'life worth living'
has become an important concept, alongside the five domains of animal welfare: the four
interacting physical/functional domains, ie 'nutrition', 'environment', 'health'
and 'behaviour', and a fifth domain of 'mental state'. The first four domains focus
on internal physiological and pathophysiological disturbances: nutritional, environmental
and health-related (1–3), and on external physical and social conditions in the animal’s
environment that may limit its capacity to express various behaviours (domain 4). Once
such internal and external factors are assessed, their anticipated affective consequences
are assigned to the fifth ‘mental’ domain, and it is these experiences that determine the
animal’s welfare state.