Qualitative behaviour assessment (QBA) measures an animal’s emotional state by evaluating how they behave and interact with their environment. QBA is a valuable assessment tool to gauge animal welfare, especially positive welfare and it has been validated in numerous scenarios and species, such as dairy cattle kept indoors, veal calves during handling, poultry, captive polar bears, dogs and more. This new research from France, worked to validate QBA using the Welfare Quality® protocol for dairy cattle kept at pasture. Three main take-home messages came from this research. The first is that intra-observer reliability of QBA at pasture was acceptable, but inter-observer reliability should be improved. The authors suggest that reliability could be improved with more time and practice in observing dairy cows’ emotional states. The second is that the QBA protocol at pasture is able to discriminate between different contexts of observation and is correlated to some behavioural responses during handling. Additionally, handling is an important area to consider in dairy cattle welfare as they are handled frequently so having a validated assessment tool is crucial. Finally, the third take home message is that QBA can be used to capture the emotional state of cows at pasture and that the Welfare Quality® protocol can reliably assess dairy cows on pasture.

For the full article, see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2024.106489  

Aubé, L., Mialon, M. M., Veissier, I., & de Boyer des Roches, A. (2025). Validation of qualitative behaviour assessment for dairy cows at pasture. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 283, 106489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2024.106489