Assessing the welfare and feeding behaviour of horned and polled sheep and cattle during live export

Summary

This project used both retrospective viewing and analysis of video recordings and real-time observation by on-board veterinarians or stockmen, made on commercial sheep and cattle shipments, to record the number of interactions occurring in 2 pens each of polled, horned, or mixed animals. The video system used allowed recording for the duration of a long-haul voyage, with two cameras set per pen to record a frame every 30 seconds. One sheep shipment and one cattle shipment were recorded, and the number of interactions counted at specific times on the video recording compared between groups, finding that there were no negative effects of mixing polled animals and those with horns within specifications. Recordings from real-time observation found similar results in the between group comparisons, although the number of interactions recorded in real-time were generally less than those seen on the video, and the correlations between the two methods were low for these two shipments. Fifteen other shipments used only real-time observations, of which 11 had usable data, and again there was no indication that mixing the animals had detrimental effects either on interactions or feeding behavior of the groups. 
This is the first time video recording has been used in commercial long-haul voyages, and proved that useful data can be collected in this way over many days. The recorded data lost some detail but was adequate for this project; it would not be of sufficient quality to identify individual animal expressions, for instance. The design of the project and the realities of videoing a commercial shipment, with only one videoed shipment of each species, and only one real-time observer to compare the video data to, did not allow a conclusion to be reached about the overall accuracy of real-time counting of interactions in pens of animals. A different project, which need not be on ship, could be conducted to compare the ability of various people to assess interactions in real-time compared to those interactions recorded on video. However, there were no indications from this work that further evaluation of the behavior and welfare of mixed polled and horned animals under these specific conditions needed to be conducted, with all methods agreeing that the between-group comparisons showed no detrimental effects on the mixed groups compared to the segregated groups.