Animal Husbandry 44th Croatian & 4th International Symposium on Agriculture 752 Original scientific paper Assessment of dairy cow welfare in farms from Transylvania Silvana Popescu 1 , Cristin Borda 1 , Eva-Andrea Lazar 1 , Cristina Iuliana Hegedüs 2 1 Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, Manastur street, no. 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania (e-mail: popescusilvana@yahoo.com) 2 Faculty of Animal Husbandry, University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, Manastur street, no. 3-5, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, Romania Abstract This work aimed the assessment of dairy cow welfare in farms with tie-stall system, in Transylvania. We evaluated 24 farms, between December 2007 and January 2008, using the Austrian system Animal Needs Index ANI 35 L/2000. The calculated overall ANI scores were between 10.5 and 22 points, with a mean value of 17.15. The results showed that only 12.5% of the investigated farms obtained a total ANI score between 21 and 24 points, which indicates agreeable welfare. In conclusion, in the Transylvanian farms are imperative immediate remedial measures in order to improve the degree of cow‘s welfare. Key words: animal needs index, animal welfare, cattle, assessment. Introduction The welfare of dairy cows encompass nowadays a major concern of public interest extending in most of the countries, due to its impact on health and productions of animals and, implicit, upon public health. More and more consumers become aware of the influence of dairy welfare upon public health, food security and environmental protection. Because of the fact that dairy welfare became part and parcel of milk-quality, its monitoring is an additional guarantee for the consumers that the products they buy derive from healthy animals, bred and kept according to standards of good practice in farms (Broom, 2004). From the economical point of view, the assessment of animal welfare is really important, because it allows in the first stage the detection of imperfections and their correction in the second stage. Thus, retrieval of shortcomings assures the integral development of genetic productive performances by the animal and, by the other hand, perfecting the technologies. The farm animal welfare is provided especially by housing and breeding systems suitable for animal health and behavioral needs and by proper farming practices, as well (Broom, 2004). Welfare is a condition of the animal, not something transmissible to it, and it range between very poor and very good (Loberg and Lidfors, 2001; Broom, 2004). Assessment of animal welfare can be done by several methods. Thus, evaluation can be based on behavioral, physiological, psychopathological parameters or productive performances. All the indicators have inconveniences and, in this way, are not reliable, used as sole assessment techniques. For this reason it was suggested that better results could be obtained in measuring animal welfare by using a system of indicators instead of individual parameters (Winckler et al., 2003; Rousing et al., 2007). Usually, determination of these indicators requires expensive investigations or high experimental effort, therefore they are inadequate in field research. More effective are the numerical assessment systems (Bartussek, 1999; Bartussek et al., 2000; Amon et al., 2001). Nowdays, there are two systems of this kind, recognized and used at international level. These are TGI 35 (ANI 35) developed by Bartussek (1999), currently used in Austria, and