Turkeys in an app: facilitating practical on-farm welfare and health assessment of commercial turkeys

Welfare assessment protocols must be science based and reliable, but also they must be practical for on-farm application. In this regard, protocols that are simple to implement and easy to understand by farmers and technical staf[ are more likely to be understood, adopted, and ultimately become a relevant tool [or guiding the companies' decision making processo Onfarm welfare assessment in commerciai meat poultry is particularly challenging because of the large number of individuals composing the flocks. Current available protocols for meat poultry requires catching and bird handling, resulting in a procedure that is time, manpower demanding, expensive and dangerous for birds and humans in the case of turkey assessment. However, farmers and flock supervisors in turkey production conduct daily routine checks based on walks through the production houses. These screenings allow individuais with visible severe problems to be identified, providing an estimation of the flock health and welfare status with minimai disruption to the birds. The new turkey protocoi based on the transect approach method ofassessment provides the dynamism ofthe walk-through inspections, but is conducted in a way that provides veracity, and inter-observer reliability. The transect method for turkey welfare assessment consisted of standardized walks through which the frequency of birds observed showing any of the predefined welfare indicators are collected and results standardized according to the actual population size. Transect walks allowed the detection of small variations in the prevalence of most welfare indicators considered across houses, while showing high inter-observer reliability. The results obtained in the turkey study provi de supporting evidence that the transect approach is a simple, but reliable, method of on-farm welfare assessment. The method has the advantage of being readily acceptable and easy to implement by producers, while maintaining high inter-observer reliability, and requiring minimum training. The i-WatchTurkey app specifically developed for on-farm turkey welfare assessment allows easy assessment of the incidence of the most relevant welfare indicators in a simple manner at the time of regular health inspection.