Animal welfare assessment programs can be used by producers as a tool to monitor conditions on their ranches or by retailers to encourage or require the adoption of health and handling standards. However, prior to this project, no welfare assessment program had been developed for conventional U.S. cow-calf operations. As such, we created a cow-calf health and handling assessment and website. The goal of this project is to teach producers, veterinaries etc., how to apply the assessment on a ranch, compare their results to other cow-calf operations, and track their progress over time.
Cassandra Tucker, cbtucker@ucdavis.edu
Professor and Researcher, UCD Department of Animal Science