On-farm welfare assessment of commercial Pekin ducks: a comparison of methods

Essam Abdelfattah; Giuseppe Vezzoli; Maja M Makagon

doi:10.1016/j.psj.2019.10.006

On-farm welfare assessment of commercial Pekin ducks: a comparison of methods

Poult Sci. 2020 Feb;99(2):689-697. doi: 10.1016/j.psj.2019.10.006. Epub 2019 Dec 20.

Authors

Essam Abdelfattah¹, Giuseppe Vezzoli², Maja M Makagon³

Affiliations

¹ Center for Animal Welfare, Department of Animal Science, University of California Davis, Davis, CA, USA; Department of Animal Hygiene, Behavior and Management, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Benha University, Benha, Egypt.
² Center for Animal Welfare, Department of Animal Science, University of California Davis, Davis, CA, USA; School of Mathematics and Science, College of the Desert, Palm Desert, CA, USA.
³ Center for Animal Welfare, Department of Animal Science, University of California Davis, Davis, CA, USA. Electronic address: mmakagon@ucdavis.edu.

Abstract

Although a number of welfare assessment methods have been developed for poultry, none have been evaluated for use in commercial duck farms. The primary objective of the study was to evaluate the inter-rater reliability and relative accuracy of 4 duck welfare assessment strategies. Over 2 experiments, 12 flocks of commercial meat ducks (5,850 to 6,300 ducks/flock) aged 30 to 34 D were evaluated. During experiment 1, six flocks were evaluated using 2 welfare assessment methods: transect walks (TW) and catch-and-inspect (CAI). During TW, 2 observers walked predetermined transects along the length of the house and recorded the number of ducks per transect that were featherless, were dirty, were lethargic, had bloody feathers, had infected eyes, and/or had plugged nostrils or were found dead. During CAI, a total of 150 ducks per flock were corralled and individually evaluated. The same welfare indicators were assessed using both methods. During experiment 2, six flocks were initially evaluated using CAI, TW, and a distance evaluation (DE; a total of 50 ducks per flock evaluated from a walking distance) and then reassessed within 24 h during the loadout (LO) process. Data were analyzed in SAS (version 9.4) to determine the observer and method effects on the incidence of welfare indicators. Interobserver reliability was high (P > 0.05) across methods for most welfare indicators. The assessment method affected the measured outcome variables in both experiments (P < 0.05). CAI resulted in higher estimated incidences of most welfare indicators than TW (experiment 1 and 2) and LO (experiment 2). DE yielded intermediate results compared with other methods (experiment 2). Results obtained using TW and LO were most similar, the only difference being the number of dead birds observed using each method (P < 0.0001). The average time required for CAI, TW, DE, and LO was 2.40 ± 0.004, 1.12 ± 0.02, 1.54 ± 0.001, 3.56 ± 0.006 h, respectively. Bootstrapping analyses showed that the observed welfare indicator prevalence estimates were affected by the number of transects (TW) and number of birds (CAI) sampled.

Keywords: Pekin duck; individual sampling; loadout; transect walks; welfare assessment.

Publication types

Comparative Study

MeSH terms

Animal Husbandry / methods*
Animal Welfare / statistics & numerical data*
Animals
Ducks*
Farms*
Indiana
Reproducibility of Results