Attitudes and professional values of veterinarians and veterinary students toward positive welfare states for dairy cattle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research that involves agricultural animal welfare has typically aimed to improve welfare by decreasing disease, distress, and pain. Positive welfare does not necessarily occur with the absence of suffering but in combination with opportunities for behaviors or affective states desired by animals. Our objectives were to describe Canadian bovine veterinarians' and veterinary students' attitudes, professional normative values, and perceived ability to promote positive welfare for dairy cows, and to explore participants' provided rationale. With an online cross-sectional survey, Canadian veterinary practitioners (n = 78) and veterinary students (n = 148) were asked, on a 7-point Likert scale, about their attitudes, perceived professional normative values, and perceived ability of veterinarians to promote positive welfare for dairy cows. We used an applied thematic analysis approach within the qualitative description methodology to analyze participants' open-ended text responses. Quantitatively, participants had very favorable attitudes (mean ± SE; 6.3 ± 0.04) and perceived favorable values (5.7 ± 0.06) in the veterinary community toward positive welfare opportunities for dairy cows. Three themes were identified to explain the professional normative values: influences from within the veterinary profession, influences from outside the veterinary profession, and personal views of participants. Participants were confident that veterinarians could suggest positive welfare opportunities for dairy cows (6.1 ± 0.06) but were uncertain that the decision to suggest these opportunities to producers was within a veterinarian's control (4.3 ± 0.11) and were not confident that implementation of positive welfare opportunities was under a veterinarian's control (2.1 ± 0.07). Three themes were identified to explain the barriers to veterinarians promoting positive welfare opportunities for dairy cows: not practical to implement, resistance to change, and concern for the animal. Participants stated that many positive welfare opportunities were impractical or expensive to implement. We conclude that positive attitudes and positive professional values exist in the veterinary community toward positive welfare for dairy cows but that much uncertainty exists regarding a veterinarian's ability to influence change to current practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".