Attitudes of Dairy Farmers toward Cow Welfare in Relation to Housing, Management and Productivity

The quality of stockmanship contributes to the human-animal relationship, animal welfare and productivity. Attitudes can affect the way farmers treat their animals, the environment they provide the animals with, and even their own job satisfaction through the feedback received from the animals. Farmers' perceptions of animals have also been shown to have an impact on productivity. We investigated 161 Finnish dairy farmers' attitudes toward improving animal welfare through an attitude questionnaire that used the Theory of Planned Behavior as a theoretical framework. The theory states that personal attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, together shape an individual's behavioral intentions and behaviors. To study the relationship between attitudes, animal welfare, and milk production, we used environment-based animal welfare indicator data consisting of categorized housing and management parameters, and mean milk production data. Non-parametric partial correlation analyses and regression analyses revealed that perceiving the measures to improve animal welfare to be important and easy were positively, although weakly, related to higher animal welfare standards/indicators, while no connection with production was established. Contrary to our expectations, sources of subjective norms, such as an agricultural adviser, were mostly negatively linked with animal welfare indicators and even with production. The farmers considered taking care of their own well-being as the most important way of improving animal welfare, and intending to do so was weakly but positively linked with animal welfare indicators. Any causal relationships, however, cannot be derived from the data.