Development and validation of animal welfare knowledge, attitude, and practice assessment tool among smallholder farmers in Ethiopia

Ayalew, G.A., Berhe, T., Mekonnen, M., Gelan, E., Wieland, B., Knight-Jones, T. and Doyle R. 2022. Development and validation of animal welfare knowledge, attitude, and practice assessment tool among smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. Poster presented at the 16th International Symposium of Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics, Halifax, Canada, 8 August 2022. Nairobi, Kenya: ILRI.

Objective: To develop and validate an assessment tool to measure knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) towards animal welfare among smallholder farmers in Ethiopia.

Materials and methods: This study was conducted among smallholder crop-livestock farmers and pastoralists in four districts of Ethiopia. The KAP questions covered a range of species and welfare topics including health and nutrition, resource availability, and behavioral and mental state dimensions of animal welfare. Item response theory models were fitted to the data from reliable items to estimate the probability of correctly answering an item as a function of the respondents’ KAP level. Graphs depicting the discriminating ability and precision of an item across different levels of the latent trait were plotted.

Results: A total of 197 respondents provided information on the set of 34 animal welfare KAP items. Overall, the highest correct mean score was recorded for the attitude section (77%) and the lowest was recorded for practice (25%). From the evaluation, the majority of the items from the Animal welfare KAP fit well with the scale. The discriminating ability of the scales was varied across the latent ability of the respondents. The knowledge and practice scale did well at identifying smallholder farmers with average and above-average trait levels while the attitude scale did well at discriminating between smallholder farmers with average and below-average trait levels. Crop-livestock farmers had a better animal welfare knowledge level than pastoralists (P<0.001). Many of the items in the knowledge section responded differently between crop-livestock farmers and pastoralists which shows the lack of an equal understanding of animal welfare among these groups.

Conclusion: The developed questionnaire had a satisfactory psychometric property for measuring animal welfare KAP in Ethiopian smallholder farmers. This tool will be used to measure the impact of current and future intervention.