By: Dr. Zalmen Hankin // May 2022
- Freedom from hunger and thirst by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health.
- Freedom from discomfort by providing an appropriate environment, including shelter and comfortable resting areas.
- Freedom from pain, injury or livestock disease by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment.
- Freedom to express their normal behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animals’ own kind.
- Freedom from fear and distress by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.

High welfare cattle raised for meat spend most of their time outdoors, they are allowed to express their natural behaviors while consuming the food they prefer the way they are adapted to eating it. But, not always this practice is applied so, and in many cases management can be significantly improved by implementation of new technologies that are continuously emerging. New digital technologies can be used for improving animal condition and maintain normal behaviors. As so, agricultural drones, equipped with cameras can be used for autonomous livestock herding, that in addition to a significant reduction of manpower while minimizing time spent on herding and livestock tools, also tend to improve animal welfare, while on the one hand avoiding animals from fear, and on the other decreasing stress. Even though it is not easy to measure or define welfare rates of the grazing cows’, eye observations that were done during drone livestockd herding, show a much calmer behavior of the cows, compared to the authentic herding by cowboys on horseback, herding by dogs, and by off-road vehicles.

Manteca, X., Mainau, E. and Temple, D. (2012). What is animal welfare? Farm Animal Welfare Education Centre, The farm animal welfare fact sheet, No.1.