Attitude toward tail docking on dairy farms

The concern for animal welfare is spreading globally and principles guiding animal welfare policies were adopted at the 72nd Annual General Session of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) in 2004. In particular, severing parts of the body, such as tail docking, is an important problem from the perspective of animal welfare. A questionnaire survey was used to investigate the attitudes toward tail docking on dairy farms and given to 19 farmers who docked their animals and 19 who did not. The questionnaire asked about (1) the rearing system, (2) the advantages and disadvantages of tail docking, (3) reasons for not docking the tail, and (4) concern for animal welfare. The results were as follows. (1) Tail docking was related to the milking parlour system, but not to farm management in terms of the size, rearing system or number of milking cows on a farm. (2) Tail docking was performed using a rubber ring (84%), without local anaesthesia during all seasons except summer. The number of farmers who docked their animals and answered that not being struck by a cow's dirty tail was an advantage of tail docking was 2.6 times the number for farmers who did not dock their animals. Only farmers that docked their animals answered that an advantage was that cows did not scatter their faeces. There were remarkable differences in two answers related to spreading faeces. Almost all farmers who did not dock their animals answered that a disadvantage of tail docking was that cows could not whisk flies off. Some farmers who docked their animals answered that in addition to cows not being able to whisk flies and dust off, the tip of the docked tail became infected, which was another shortcoming of tail docking. (3) More than half of the farmers felt that tail docking was unnecessary. Several answers were from an ethical perspective, for example, we respect our cows and we feel that the cows suffer. (4) Of the 38 farmers, 23 had not heard of the term 'animal welfare', and such concern was thus low on their farms. For both groups of farmers, the items related to stress in the cows that raised the greatest concern were behavioural restrictions (76.3%), the rearing environment (63.2%) and breeding methods (31.6%).