Developing a welfare assessment protocol for Australian lot-fed cattle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lot feeding of cattle has gained momentum in recent years to improve efficiency in meeting market demands for high quality protein. Concurrently, societal concern for the welfare of animals raised in intensive farming systems has increased. Thus, the reporting of animal health and welfare measures is a key goal for the Australian cattle lot-fed industry. Although feedlots vary in location, climate, capacity, cattle genotype, and feeding programs, many welfare concerns are applicable across the industry. Despite this, no recognised standardised animal welfare assessment protocol exists for the Australian lot-fed industry. This study aimed to identify relevant measures to develop an assessment protocol, by identifying key welfare issues and their relevant measures, considering the validity, reliability, and practicality of each when applied to the feedlot context. An advisory model was derived after reviewing the relevant literature and five international protocols for the assessment of beef cattle (Welfare Quality®, AssureWel, US Beef Quality Assurance assessment tool, Canadian Feedlot Animal Care Assessment program, and an Australian Live Export industry protocol), followed by stakeholder consultation. A total of 109 measures were evaluated, with 99 environmental-, management-, resource- and animal-based measures being proposed. Piloting of the protocol on commercial feedlots will enable further refinement and validation, to provide an evidence-based, practical protocol to facilitate standardised monitoring of cattle welfare. Such a protocol could promote continued advances in animal welfare at a feedlot level and support a sustainable industry by addressing societal concerns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.129 | 0.100 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".