Animal Welfare Laboratory, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil.
Animal Sciences Unit, Flanders Research Institute for Agricultural, Melle, Belgium.
J Appl Anim Welf Sci. 2024 Jul-Sep;27(3):454-464. doi: 10.1080/10888705.2022.2105648. Epub 2022 Aug 5.
When the gradation of animal welfare is scored through ordinal scales and equidistant tags are used, empirical data between tags tend to be non-equidistant. Ordinal rate scales (ORS) and visual analogue scales (VAS) were tested for the assessment of contact dermatitis on breast and abdominal areas (CD), footpad dermatitis (FP), hock burns (HB) and bird soiling (BS) in broiler chickens. Calculations regarding the inter-rater reliability, the correlation between VAS and ORS and amongst the welfare indicators measured with both scales, and the equidistance of ORS categories in relation to values measured using VAS, were made. A total of 1,303 broiler chickens from 10 flocks was assessed on-farm by three raters using both scales. Inter-rater reliabilities of CD and HB were higher when using VAS compared with ORS, but FP was lower. Correlations between scales varied between 0.90-0.97 and 0.77-0.95 (P<0.001), considering mean and individual values. Low-to-moderate correlations were observed between the four indicators using the scales. Tags on VAS that best represented ORS were non-equidistant. Results suggest both scales were reliable assessing the selected broiler chicken welfare indicators.
当通过序数量表对动物福利进行分级，并且使用等距标记时，标记之间的经验数据往往是非等距的。本研究旨在测试ordinal rate scales（ORS）和 visual analogue scales（VAS）在评估肉鸡乳房和腹部接触性皮炎（CD）、脚垫皮炎（FP）、跗关节烧伤（HB）和禽粪污染（BS）中的应用。计算了 ORS 与 VAS 之间的评分者间信度、VAS 和 ORS 之间的相关性以及两种评分方法之间的福利指标相关性，以及 ORS 类别与 VAS 测量值之间的等距性。使用两种评分方法，共对来自 10 个鸡群的 1303 只肉鸡进行了现场评估，由 3 名评分者进行评估。与 ORS 相比，VAS 用于评估 CD 和 HB 时的评分者间信度更高，但 FP 较低。考虑到平均值和个体值，两种评分方法之间的相关性在 0.90-0.97 和 0.77-0.95（P<0.001）之间变化。使用两种评分方法时，四个指标之间的相关性较低至中度。在 VAS 上最能代表 ORS 的标记是非等距的。结果表明，两种评分方法都能可靠地评估所选肉鸡福利指标。
