Year: 2014
Type: book
Abstract: Mastitis is an animal welfare problem.Also, mastitis might be a food safety problem, but surely mastitis is an economic problem.Being an endemic disease on dairy farms all over the world, mastitis is an important cause of a less efficient milk production.Moreover, mastitis affects milk quality directly through a change in technical and hygienic milk quality and indirectly through the intrinsic milk quality.This makes mastitis a concern for the dairy industry.Mastitis management, therefore, should have the goal of improving milk quality and the efficiency of milk production and thus make the production of milk more sustainable.Given the multi-factorial nature of mastitis, management consists of a wide range of activities.For the dairy farmer, many of the daily decisions taken on mastitis are associated with treatment: treatment of diseased cows (clinical or subclinical) and dry cow therapy.The following factors are important when evaluating the optimal treatment: welfare of the cow, use of antibiotics, economics, and performance of the treatment (cure rate).The relative importance of these factors differs between dairy production systems.Choosing the correct treatment approach is therefore an act of balancing.This paper describes the current knowledge on the balance between economics, welfare and use of antibiotics with regard to mastitis treatment decisions.It will first describe the factors that are involved with treatment decisions and will then give available knowledge on treatment decisions for clinical mastitis, subclinical mastitis, dry cow therapy and finally on treatment decisions in automatic milking. Factors in Treatment DecisionsEconomics has, for a long time been one of the factors that has been taken into account in treatment discussions.Dairy farmers do have a business and control of disease should be a weighing of the costs of control versus the reduced losses because of that control.The decisions farmers take are, therefore, aimed at economic optimization rather than maximization of animal health.Mastitis is associated with pain (e.g., Kemp et al., 2008) and can therefore be seen as an animal welfare problem.In a recent, study where changes in behavior in relation to occurrence of clinical mastitis were studied, it was found that cows with mild clinical mastitis did have a reduced lying time, increased activity and restless behaviors during milking (Medrano-Galarza et al., 2012).However, there are no good assessments yet to assess the pain associated with mastitis
Authors: H. Hogeveen, C. Kamphuis, W. Steeneveld
Language: English
Subfield: Animal Science and Zoology
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2581513625