Automated Evaluation of the Risk Factor Associated with Footpad Dermatitis and Lameness in Intensive Poultry Farming
Footpad lesions and lameness are important welfare and economic issue in the poultry industry.Among them footpad dermatitis are characterised by skin lesions of the footpads.Assessment of animal welfare is typically based on manual scoring, which requires a lot of trained manpower/labour.Furthermore, movement of assessors between farms could potentially create biosecurity risks.Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) combines information technologies into on-line automated tools that can be used to control, monitor and model the behaviour of animals with the advantage of continuous data collection without animal disturbance or handling.The aim of this study was to find the association between environmental predisposing factors,measured continuously (such as the indoor temperature and humidity) and leg problems, scored manually during the welfare assessment procedure, in order to find an automated prediction system to detect those lesions.The welfare of the chickens was assessed three times per cycle (at week 3, 4 and 5), including scoring footpad dermatitis (FPD), lameness (LMNS) and litter quality (LQ).Data analysis was performed by combining data from the welfare assessments with environmental data collected by the automated monitoring systems.In particular, evaluation of the risk probability (odds ratio;OR) related to presence of FPD,and LMNS was performed to estimate the effect of time the birds spent outside the temperaturehumidity comfort zone (POOC) during the entire production cycle.The analysis showed that the occurrences of FPD and LMNS were more frequent when the flock was exposed to poor environmental conditions for prolonged time.Evaluation of the risk factor for FPD and LMNS performed by the automated environmental control may offer an innovative approach to reducing and controlling the occurrence of severe leg problems.
Foot pad dermatitis PLF Intensive poultry farming Thermal comfort Risk factor
Emanuela Tullo Ilaria Fontana Alberto Pe(n)a Fernandez Erik Vranken Daniel Berckmans Marcella Guarino
Department of Veterinary and Technological Sciences for Food Safety, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Biosystems, Division Animal and Human Health Engineering, M3-BIORES, Katholieke Univer Department of Biosystems, Division Animal and Human Health Engineering, M3-BIORES, Katholieke Univer
国际会议
The First Asian Conference on Precision Livestock Farming (2016 PLF-Asia)(首届亚洲智慧畜牧业国际研讨会)
北京
英文
81-88
2016-09-09（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）