Welfare quality applied to the Brazilian dairy cattle

Due to the necessity of establishing animal welfare standards for the Brazilian dairy sector in harmony to the new consumer's requirements and legislation, it was drawn up the project Welfare Quality (WQ) - Brazil, based on the proposed project Welfare Quality (R) European Union for dairy cattle. The assessments of animal welfare were performed in seven dairy farms at Sao Paulo/Brazil. They were selected in order to represent the main types of dairy farms found in Brazil. To carry out the project, it was used the evaluation protocol of welfare in Dairy Cattle Welfare Quality (R) Assessment Protocol for Cattle, which is based on the principles of Good Feeding, Proper Installation, Good Health and Appropriate Behavior. The protocol defines four possible categories for the assessed dairy farms: Not classified, Acceptable, Enhanced or Excellent. Only one farm received category "Acceptable", while the others received category "Enhanced". A highlight is the unsatisfactory score for the principle "Appropriate Behavior" received by four farms. Possible reasons are inappropriate animals handling, assessor subjectivity and/or protocol's subjectivity. To this final point, some emotion standards are vague and do not describe how animals should behave for each type of situation during evaluation. Finally, it can be concluded that the European protocol for the Evaluation of Welfare in Dairy Cattle Welfare Quality (R) may be used in Brazilian dairy farms provided there is previous assessor training and adaptation of some points to be feasible to Brazilian dairy sector.