Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Prof. Andrew Fisher: I'm a professor here at the Faculty of Veterinary
Science. I've worked with animal welfare for over 20 years.
The five freedoms represent one of the best concepts we have in animal
welfare. They represent the goals that we should strive for in ensuring the
welfare of animals in our care. I believe that it's important for the
farming industries to engage in animal welfare and to demonstrate their
performance in animal welfare.
Expressing normal behavior means, for cattle, providing sufficient space to
lie down, the opportunity to interact with other cattle, and also, the
opportunity through adequate roughage in the diet to spend time ruminating.
Geoff Cornford: It's important that cattle are given the opportunity to
express their natural behaviors, and we provide, within the pens, the
opportunity for them to express their natural behavior, play with other
cattle, ruminate, do all the things that they do in a pasture based
environment.
There's a minimum of space requirement of Australian feedlots of nine
square meters per head. But in reality, areas are generally 15 to 25. So
for an animal to be able to exhibit its natural behaviors, it obviously has
to have enough space. So it is in the feedlot's interest, and obviously the
cattle's interest, that they have enough room to exhibit their natural
behaviors.
Brad Robinson: What we also try to do is group animals in mob sizes that
enable them to exhibit their natural behaviors that they normally would in
the pasture environment. So we're trying to group them with cattle that
they're familiar with and to be able to interact that way.
Tony Batterham: A lot of the cattle in this feedlot for example, were
born in the same paddock, have grown up together, and they're here in the
feedlot together.
To express normal behavior, it's important for our staff to actually know
what that is. Staff training is involved, from my perspective, a lot to do
with animal health, but we also want staff to know when they can recognize
the cattle are expressing their normal behavior. So we go through a whole
range of presentation and tutorials on what that behavior is.
Prof. Andrew Fisher: The cattle, as they move from the pasture
environment to a feedlot environment, what's really important is that the
diet has an adequate level of roughage. It's roughage that actually
promotes rumination in cattle, and we know that rumination is a really
important natural behavior.
Tony Batterham: The nutrition is fantastic. There is nothing that the
cattle are missing out on, but it's important for us to facilitate that
transition to this new diet. Cattle are able to still utilize elements of
roughage in that ration. It's not all starches. It's not all carbohydrates.
Prof. Andrew Fisher: We know that cattle welfare is good when we can see
these natural behaviors being exhibited.