Western Canadian cow-calf producers' perspectives about cattle welfare, handling, and training in cattle handling: A thematic analysis
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beef producers and handlers have critical roles in influencing the welfare of beef cattle through their handling practices. Similarly, cattle handling training opportunities are important to enhance animal welfare by improving handling skills, attitudes, and handler behaviour. In this study, 15 audio-recorded interviews were conducted with cow-calf producers from Western Canada (Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan) to gather their views on cattle welfare, handling, and training in cattle handling. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a thematic analysis approach that revealed seven major themes: (1) producers understand the complexity of animal welfare and its assessment; (2) public and consumer welfare concerns and producers' own sense of responsibility drive prioritization of welfare practices; (3) optimizing animal welfare enhances profitability; (4) cattle handling has a direct relationship with cattle welfare; (5) producers are highly motivated to adopt low-stress cattle handling practices, but acknowledge that implementation varies; (6) cattle handling training is a valuable learning experience that is linked with positive effects on the production system; and (7) effective handling training must reflect both on-farm settings and handling situations. In conclusion, participants had a strong understanding of animal welfare and its assessment. They highlighted the crucial role of handling practices in influencing welfare, as well as the connection between welfare improvement and operation profitability. Additionally, they recognized the value of cattle handling training in enhancing handling skills, insisting that such training should be conducted locally, at an affordable price, be practical, and reflect farm settings common for the majority of producers. • Participants understand animal welfare and its assessment. • Public and consumer welfare concerns, a sense of responsibility, and profitability motivate the improvement of welfare practices. • Handling influences livestock welfare, productivity and human-animal relationship. • Livestock handling training helps improve handling skills, safety during handling, handlers' motivation to work, livestock welfare, and operation profitability. • Effective and practical handling training must reflect common farm setting, be easily accessible, and conducted at lower cost.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it