Indian J Dairy Sci 73(1): 77-80 77 RESEARCH ARTICLE An observational study investigating uniformity of manual body condition scoring in dairy cows Abhishek Paul 1 , Champak Bhakat 2 , Santu Mondal 1 , and Ajoy Mandal 3 1 Division of Livestock Production Management, ICAR-National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal-132 001, Haryana, India 2 Division of Livestock Production Management, ERS-NDRI, Kalyani, India 3 Division of Animal Genetics and Breeding, ERS-NDRI, Kalyani, India Abhishek Paul () Division of Livestock Production Management, ICAR-National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal-132 001, Haryana, India Email:abhishek2011v01@gmail.com Received: 29 October 2019 / Accepted: 28 January 2020 / Published online: 27 February 2020 Indian Dairy Association (India) 2020 © Abstract: Body condition scores (BCS) are very useful for dairy herd management; however, its reliability and consistency of recordings made by observers have been questioned. Moreover, regular high-quality manual body condition scoring of an individual cow is difficult as a routine practice on the farm. This study aimed to find out the agreement in BCS within- and between the observers. An observational study was conducted in which two observers independently scored BCS of 43 crossbred animals from one dairy hard. Cohen’s kappa (κ ) and spearman’s rho (ρ) was computed to quantify the agreement between observer for overall BCS measurement and only kappa test for different BCS groups (high, medium and low). For overall BCS score ê of 0.62 to 0.71 (p<0.001) and 0.68 to 0.74 (p<0.001) were obtained for intra observer 1 and 2 respectively, such values would be interpreted as moderate agreement. Whereas, the inter-observer agreement (ê) was found to be low i.e. between 0.52 to 0.60 (p<0.001). However, the spearman’s rho value was higher in all the cases, indicating a good correlation among the individual observers. Besides, kappa value (κ ) for different BCS groups revealed the lowest agreement between observers (0.31 to 0.37, p<0.001) and within observers (0.34 to 0.59, p<0.001) for medium BCS group as compared to the other BCS groups. These findings suggest multiple observers should perform manual Body Condition Scoring for better accuracy in the outcome. Keywords: BCS, Dairy cattle, Observation variation Introduction Initially, BCS evaluation chart was developed by assessing the eight anatomical locations of the rear half of the cow within the areas of the loin, pelvis and tail head and prepared a scale ranges from 1 to 5, using 0.25-unit increments (Wildman et al. 1982, Edmonson et al. 1989). Several researchers from different countries had developed various scales by observing and palpating the animal body. Bewley and Schutz (2008) reviewed international BCS systems, in the UK and Ireland widely used scale ranges from 1-5 with 0.50 and 0.25 intervals, respectively. Likewise, in Australia and New Zealand most common and widely used scale ranges from 1-8 and 1-10 with an increment of 0.5 scale intervals. In India, Prasad (1994) has developed a modified Body Condition Scoring scale ranges from 1 to 6, with an increment of 0.5 for better accuracy. Evans, (1978) and Nicoll, (1981) have studied the factors causing variation in BCS and found 60 to 70 % was due to animal variation, 5 % from the evaluator and 10 % happened animal-evaluator variation. The quality of manual Body Condition Scoring depends on the observers and scoring protocol (Kristensen et al. 2006), where a trained person had consistency up to 58 to 67 % accuracy and 27 % precision by an untrained person (Ferguson et al. 1994). Inter-observer agreement was more reliable than the single observer conducted all BCS evaluation (Morin et al. 2017). Also, BCS (1-5 point scale) changes of 0.25 cannot realistically be detected, even with trained observers (Bewley et al. 2008; Bewley and Schutz, 2008). When comparing the methods for monitoring the BCS, Mazeris (2015) found an automated BCS system to be highly accurate to a human scorer, with 98% of scores being within a quarter-point. Previously, intra and inter observational agreements were done in 1 to 5 BCS scale with 0.25 unit increments (Kristensen et al. 2006; Morin et al. 2017) based on the scale of Ferguson et al. (1994). Our hypothesis of the present study was observational agreement within and between professionals on BCS in 1-6 scale with 0.5 unit increments. Materials and Methods Data collection Two veterinarians were independently assessed BCS of a total of 43 cows. BCS was measured using a visual plus palpation