Health and welfare monitoring of dairy cows

Historically cow health management relied on human memory and visual observation. Digital data recording began to supplement and replace these as herds became larger and computers arrived in recent decades. True digitisation became possible as sensors became directly connected to computers. New techniques of monitoring animal health and welfare automatically and remotely have become commonplace. This paper reviews the priority of conditions that need monitoring in animal welfare terms. It discusses the need to understand the ability of an animal's immune system to self heal as a dynamic contiuum and the need to replace antibiotic use with prophylactic management techniques. It then reviews the technologies that have been tried and reported for each of the conditions of interest. The paper describes the gaps in our technology systems particularly in monitoring parturition, nutritional disorders and mastitis and some additions to veterinary training to identify trends in herd data.