Assessing Animal Welfare in Dairy Farming: Insights on Housing and Management Practices

Nicola Blackie, PhD, Royal Veterinary College, United Kingdom

Dr Nicola Blackie is a Senior lecturer in Production Animal Science at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC).  She has a strong interest in the use of technology to detect disease and to assess welfare in farmed animals.  Her PhD research utilized accelerometers and computer gait analysis to detect changes caused by lameness in dairy cows. Current areas of interest include the use of accelerometers and thermal imaging to measure behavior, welfare and productivity in cows and calves. She is also interested in resource use of cattle and how it relates to positive animal welfare.  Good housing has a huge impact on the behavior and welfare of dairy cattle and calves. As well as this being a research interest, she is also a CowSignals master trainer.

Thomas Zanon, PhD, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy

Dr. Thomas Zanon is a Junior Professor at the Faculty of Agricultural, Environmental and Food Sciences at the Free University of Bolzano. Dr. Zanon has substantial experience in phenotypic trait recording in farm animals with focus on functional health traits. He mainly studied dairy production systems focusing on their impact on behavior, health, and health indicators. Moreover, he analyzed milk quality traits including fatty acids and protein profiles mainly from local dual-purpose cattle breeds and additionally addressed associations with further breeding goal traits and economy. Over the last years he performed several studies in the past to evaluate the environmental impact of different livestock production systems witch special emphasis on mountain livestock farming.