7844: The human-animal relationship and animal health management

Waiblinger, Susanne; Mülleder, Cornelia and Menke, Christoph (2006) The human-animal relationship and animal health management. Paper presented at Joint Organic Congress, Odense, Denmark, May 30-31, 2006..

Summary

he aim of the paper is to present new results on the association of human-animal relationship (HAR) and dairy cow health and to present a framework on the way of action of the HAR. 80 organic and conventional dairy herds in cubicle loose housing were visited once. Animal health parameters and influencing factors HAR, housing and management were recorded. The relative importance of factors for the prevalence of lameness, lesions at carpal and tarsal joints and somatic cell counts (SCC) was determined by multivariate analysis. Behaviour and attitudes of stockpeople were predictors for prevalence of lameness, SCC and lesions at the carpal joints, supporting a direct effect of the quality of the HAR on health. Further, the better the stockperson's relationship to his/her animals was, the more empha-sis they placed on taking the animals’ needs into account when making management or resource de-sign decisions. This confirms earlier results and shows the important indirect action of HAR on animal health. To guarantee a high level of health and wel-fare and thus high process and product quality, the human-animal relationship has to be taken into ac-count.

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