Euthanasia of Danish dairy cows evaluated in two questionnaire surveys.docVIP

Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica BioMedCentral Research Open Access Euthanasia of Danish dairy cows evaluated in two questionnaire surveys Peter T Thomsen* and Jan Tind S?rensen Address: University of Aarhus, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Animal Health, Welfare and Nutrition, P. O. Box 50, DK-8830 Tjele, Denmark Email: Peter T Thomsen* - PeterT.Thomsen@agrsci.dk; Jan Tind S?rensen - Jantind.Sorensen@agrsci.dk * Corresponding author Published: 21 August 2008 Received: 30 April 2008 Accepted: 21 August 2008 Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica 2008, 50:33 doi:10.1186/1751-0147-50-33 This article is available from: /content/50/1/33 ? 2008 Thomsen and S?rensen; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Mortality risk in Danish dairy cows has more than doubled since 1990 (from 2% in 1990 to 5% in 2005). Until now, registrations about dead cows in the Danish Cattle Database have not included information about whether the cow died unassisted or was euthanized. Methods: We interviewed a random sample of 196 Danish dairy farmers that had reported a dead cow to the Danish Cattle Database in 2002 and 196 dairy farmers that had reported a dead cow in 2006. Our objectives were to evaluate the proportion of euthanized cows, changes in the behaviour of farmers regarding euthanasia of cows over the years and possible reasons for these changes. Results: It seems that the threshold for euthanasia of cows among farmers has changed. Farmers generally reported a lower threshold for euthanasia compared to 5–10 years ago. Conclusion: The threshold for euthanasia of cows has, according to the dairy farmers, become lower. This might have positive impacts on animal welfare as more se