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Optimal Flow—A Pilot Study Balancing Sheep Movement and Welfare in Abattoirs by Starling, Melissa J. (author);Payne, Elyssa (author);McGreevy, Paul (author) is a Agricultural and Biological Sciences article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Optimal Flow—A Pilot Study Balancing Sheep Movement and Welfare in Abattoirs about?

Abattoirs are faced with the challenge of moving livestock efficiently through the plant, while also engaging in handling practices that assure good animal welfare. Achieving optimal outcomes for both of these goals can bring them into conflict. An additional source of conflict can arise from the design of the abattoir. These problems are compounded by the dearth of research available to inform how livestock should be handled to achieve all of these goals. We applied the concept of ‘Optimal Flow’ to describe conditions under which rate of movement is maximised while overt signs of distress in sheep are minimised. Effectively, this represents the point at which trade-offs between speed and welfare converge. The current pilot study examined the behavioural interactions between humans (n = 5), livestock herding dogs (n = 7), and sheep (n = 3235) in a large Australian abattoir to describe the factors associated with an increase or decrease in rate of sheep movement per minute. It revealed that distress behaviours in sheep were associated with dog presence and with a decrease in livestock movement rate. However, we found that as sheep density increased, there was increased livestock mov

Who reads Optimal Flow—A Pilot Study Balancing Sheep Movement and Welfare in Abattoirs?

Author

Starling, Melissa J. (author);Payne, Elyssa (author);McGreevy, Paul (author)

Publisher

MDPI AG

Published

2021

Language

EN

Field

Agricultural and Biological Sciences (Life Sciences)