Sessions

In modern dairy cattle farming, ensuring appropriate animal welfare and effective disease prevention are of paramount importance. Therefore, the aim of my study was to assess the animal welfare and biosecurity status of Hungarian Holstein-Friesian herds and to investigate the relationships between these two areas. The study was conducted across the seven administrative regions of Hungary on twenty dairy cattle farms with different milking technologies, housing systems, and production performances. A total of 12272 lactating cows were kept in the examined herds, with herd sizes ranging from 242 to 1,205 cows per farm. The animal welfare assessment was carried out based on the Welfare Quality® protocol, which evaluates four main principles: Good feeding, Good housing, Good health, and Appropriate behaviour. To assess biosecurity, the Biocheck.UGent® questionnaire was applied, which addresses external and internal biosecurity separately. The assessment was based on personal interviews with farm managers and attending veterinarians, as well as on-site farm visits. Both assessment tools score farms on a scale from 0 to 100. Out of the twenty farms examined, 16 (80%) were categorized as "Acceptable" and 4 (20%) as "Enhanced" in terms of animal welfare. The overall average scores for the four main welfare principles were as follows: Good feeding: 41.37 ± 8.39; Good housing: 63.16 ± 8.76; Good health: 21.88 ± 6.74; Appropriate behaviour: 30.73 ± 6.97. The average score for external biosecurity was 87.45 ± 5.23, for internal biosecurity 72.10 ± 7.89, and the total biosecurity score was 80.05 ± 5.20. In analyzing the relationships between animal welfare and biosecurity scores, the "Feed and water" biosecurity subcategory showed the strongest correlation with the overall WQ score (Spearman's rank ρ = 0.608; 95% CI: 0.213–0.832; raw p = 0.0045), and this was the only association that remained statistically significant after adjustment for multiple comparisons (p = 0.045). Based on my results, the relationship between animal welfare and biosecurity levels on dairy cattle farms —in contrast to the strong, comprehensive correlation previously found in turkey farms— is weaker and more specific: not biosecurity as a whole, but primarily those elements most closely linked to daily management routines show an association with welfare levels. Based on the welfare assessment of the examined farms, "Good health" proved to be the most critical principle requiring improvement, showing the lowest average score (21.88 ± 6.74 points). The deficit in this area is primarily attributable to low scores in the criteria "Absence of pain induced by management procedures" (20.65 points) and "Absence of disease" (24.70 points), highlighting the need for improved pain management protocols and more effective prevention of various animal diseases.