Animal welfare and quality perception in mountain dairy products.

Supervisor : Stefano Bovolenta

Animal welfare is a major concern in the debate regarding sustainable food production. The Welfare Quality® was the largest research project on animal welfare funded by the European Commission. Despite the innovative approach, the Welfare Quality protocol for dairy cattle was developed and validated in intensive dairy farms. Traditional mountain farms are small-scale transhumant systems which provide society with a wide variety of local products and services. The project aims at: i) assessing dairy cow welfare with the Welfare Quality protocol in order to identify critical points when it is applied to small scale farms and thus ii) applying an adapted method for small-scale dairy farms recently published by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). As a final stage, consumers’ behavior and acceptability of dairy products tested for animal welfare will be investigated..

Biography and contacts 

Anna Zuliani was born in 1985 in Udine-Italy. She graduated in Veterinary Medicine at the University of Parma (Italy) in 2009. After a research-based Master of Science at the University of Calgary (Canada) she joined the Department of Agricultural, Food, Environmental and Animal Science at the University of Udine.

Email zuliani.anna.2@spes.uniud.it

Phone 0432558177