Nutrition and the Welfare of Farm Animals

This book explores the importance of good nutrition in ensuring an adequate standard of welfare for farm animals. It is often not realized that farm animals can suffer when they are fed unsuitable diets, which may be because these diets are more economic or the farmer does not know how to rectify poor nutrition. This book reveals how to recognize and deal with feeding problems for farm animals, when the animal’s behaviour is indicating a deficiency, through oral stereotypies for example, or when its immune system is suppressed by dietary deficiencies. Feeding livestock in emergency situations can present special challenges, and one of life’s simplest pleasures, the availability of water, can also be an unrecognized problem for many farm animals. Feeding is rarely recognized for the major welfare issue that it is. We may assume that animals in intensive husbandry conditions have adequate feed, yet it is often too concentrated and designed primarily to maximize production from the animals, in the form of growth, milk yield or reproduction. In extensive rangeland conditions adequate feed supply is often not assured, potentially leading to undernutrition with serious consequences for the health and even survival of livestock. Humans in developed countries rarely suffer food shortages but this book will awaken concern that farm animals there are being systematically and routinely malnourished.