Relevance of animal-based indicators for the evaluation of sheep welfare as perceived by different stakeholders

Despite its importance little is known about the attitudes of different stakeholder categories towards issues that impact the welfare of sheep. This study determined the relevance attributed by various stakeholders to different sheep welfare indicators and assessed which demographic characteristics can influence their scores. Data were collected through a questionnaire presented on paper face-to-face to 15 sheep farmers in Italy during farm visits in June and July 2020 and the same questionnaire was transferred online to a Google Form and an announcement was sent by email and on social platforms to consumers, with a total of 311 respondents completed the questionnaire. The survey was composed of two parts. In the first part respondents were asked to declare their demographic characteristics. In the second part they rated the relevance attributed to eleven indicators of sheep welfare (eight animal-based: leanness, fleece condition, fleece cleanliness, skin lesions, tail docking, lameness, hoof overgrowth, occurrence of mastitis; and three resource-based: insufficient clean drinking water availability, thermal discomfort, access to pasture) using a ten-point Likert scale. An ordinal logistic regression descending function with stepwise selection was used to analyze the effects within demographic data and the distribution of the Likert scale for each indicator. The number of respondents (n = 311) was quite small, nevertheless, the differences that are reported give some guidance on the relative importance accorded to each of these groups of stakeholders to each of the welfare indicators. Female respondents gave higher relevance to most of the indicators compared with male respondents (P<0.05), whereas respondents with a lower education level gave more relevance to four out of the eleven welfare indicators compared with stakeholders with a higher education level (P<0.05). As for respondent categories, non-farmer experts attributed more relevance to lameness, whereas farmers gave a lower relevance to tail docking, while expressing a higher level of concern for leanness compared with the other categories (P<0.05). Finally, more frequent consumers of sheep products considered leanness to be most important (P<0.05). No significant difference was found based on the nationality or the work declared. This study provides information about how different stakeholder categories perceive different aspects of sheep welfare and whether this perception is affected by demographic characteristics, thus promoting informed dialogue between society and the scientific community about the relevance to be attributed to different sheep welfare indicators.