Diagnóstico de bem-estar de bovinos no contexto da medicina veterinária legal: Revisão

This review is intended to discuss critical points of animal welfare that affect the cattle production systems. It is based on legal veterinary medicine, which includes negligence, malpractice, and recklessness, which can be associated with mistreatment, cruelty, and abuse. It is hypothesized that cattle exploration still does not satisfactorily meet the technical, ethical, and legal concerns, as it presents inconsistencies and contradictions regarding national and international animal legislation, legal veterinary medicine, animal welfare and rights. Animal welfare has been increasingly more important in global setting. As society recognizes pain and suffering as relevant factors, animal welfare will promote outstanding economic value to production systems. The balance between animal welfare and the economic aspects in animal production represents the greatest challenge to ensure ethical and humanitarian products of high-quality and cost-effective standard. In production systems, scenarios affecting animal welfare include disease, trauma, malnutrition, social interactions, housing conditions, type of management, transport conditions, mutilations, and veterinary treatments. Legal veterinary medicine covers wide areas of operation, among which animal welfare forensics is an important demand to identify animal mistreatment, cruelty, and abuse. In practice, the veterinarian may suspect of pathologies not related to routine management contingencies. Cases of mistreatment, cruelty, and abuse may be present in the production system by the use of archaic, outdated techniques, which predisposes the occurrence of diseases, which are sometimes hidden or unnoticed by owners and employees, only to be revealed by the veterinarian during routine clinical exams. In this respect, it becomes important to perform welfare diagnostics. This review compiles the main critical aspects in systemic approach, which can be used by veterinary experts when performing cattle welfare assessments. The clinical medicine when associated with the knowledge of welfare and the entire production system provides all scientific basis for welfare diagnosis and preparation of forensic reports in cases of negligence, malpractice, and recklessness involving animal mistreatment, cruelty, and abuse. El objetivo de esta revisión es discutir los puntos críticos de bienestar animal que afectan a los sistemas de producción de bovinos. Tiene como fundamento la medicina veterinaria legal, incluyendo neglige