Animal welfare and production systems in the 21st century

Abstract

Animal welfare has been gaining prominence on the world stage in recent years. This highlight the need to adapt production systems. The term animal welfare is a growing concept in the global context and has undergone important changes in its definition, evaluation and interpretation in the last century. The science of animal welfare recognizes the importance of the five freedoms as a way of conceptualizing welfare and the need for a reinterpretation of how to assess and interpret the status of welfare, especially for production animals. This reinterpretation culminated in the development of the Five Domains model, a model designed to assess animal welfare in a more complete, systematic and comprehensive way. The model has four physical / functional domains, evaluated through the definition of indicators. The assessments enabled the incorporation of many protocols for analyzing welfare, aimed at animal production systems, in which the general state of welfare reflects its status, which can be defined as a scale, being positive, neutral or negative. The objective of this bibliographic review is to highlight the evolution of animal welfare science considering the five domains as the main criteria to be used to define the welfare status of production animals.