DEVELOPING A PROTOTYPE WELFARE ASSESSMENT PROTOCOL FOR HORSES AND DONKEYS

Animal welfare describes a potentially measurable quality of a living animal and it relates to both the animal’s feelings as well as to its health state. Public concern about equine welfare has steadily grown during recent years not only among riders and horsepersons, but also among passionates and general public. In the present thesis, with the global aim to develop a welfare assessment protocol for horses and donkeys that can be used on-farm, a review of the literature to date and research studies carried out in the frame of the Animal Welfare Indicators project (AWIN) are presented. The importance of the use of valid and reliable animal-based indicators is highlighted throughout the thesis as well as on-farm feasibility. Horse Grimace Scale is presented as a new indicator to assess pain in horses. Other studies are related to the validation and refinement of other animal-based indicators such as a Novel Object fear test, Human-Animal relationship tests and the Qualitative Behaviour Assessment. Furthermore, the outstanding innovation of the AWIN project is the dissemination of the scientific results to stakeholders through the preparation of new training tools, such as learning objects and apps. In fact, the possibility of using new tools to disseminate little pieces of knowledge can help to increase awareness of people working with equines in their welfare, shorten the time needed for dissemination of good scientific information and indirectly to improve the welfare condition of horses and donkeys. The welfare indicators and the training material developed in the frame of the AWIN project and reported in this thesis represent a useful toolbox that can be used to respond to the increasing of the expectations toward a more efficient and transparent evaluation of animal welfare for species where no EU standards exist.