BUILDING PUBLIC TRUST IN DAIRY FARMING: UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF FARM CULTURE, TRAINING AND RISK FACTORS THAT LEAD TO POOR ANIMAL HANDLING.

Our proposed integrated research and extension project aims to build trust in the U.S. dairy industry by engaging the public and dairy industry professionals, including personnel who handle cattle directly ("stockpeople"). We will design, implement, and evaluate a training program to promote humane dairy cattle-handling practices based on behavioral-change theories, which have proven to be successful in the Australian swine and dairy cattle sectors, and which incorporate the attitudes held by both dairy-industry and public stakeholders. Our comprehensive, highly interdisciplinary project will integrate applied psychology and animal welfare science to provide practical, socially sustainable, evidence-based information to improve dairy stockperson training and dairy cattle welfare.The long-term goal of our project is to build public trust in the U.S. dairy industry by improving dairy workers' attitudes and behavior toward dairy cattle. We will address this goal using 5 specific objectives:Obj. 1: Evaluate public attitudes toward dairy cattle-handling practices and stockperson training. Our findings will help establish which handling practices, if done poorly, represent the greatest risk for negative public perception.Obj. 2: Determine dairy stockperson attitudes toward dairy cows and working with them, along with the factors associated with those attitudes. We predict that individual, social, and informational factors will contribute to stockperson attitudes toward the cattle under their care.Obj. 3: Design a newtraining program to improve dairy stockperson attitudes and behavior toward cattle. We anticipate incorporating findings from Obj. 1 and 2 into an accessible, bilingual and culturally relevant program for the U.S. dairy industry.Obj. 4: Implement and field test the efficacy of the redesigned ProHand Dairy training program. We predict our redesigned training program will improve stockperson attitudes and behaviors toward dairy cattle, resulting in improvements in animal-based welfare indicators.Obj. 5: Extend the results of our multidisciplinary aims to the dairy industry and public.These objectives directly address the Inter-Disciplinary Engagement in Animal Systems (IDEAS) program priority to identify and resolve factors that influence building trust around animal agriculture across a diversity of communities, such as consumers and producers, to improve animal welfare and well-being. Ours will be the first project to use this highly interdisciplinary approach to gain a deeper understanding of why negative human-animal interactions occur on dairy farms and how to best prevent them. This information, along with our training program, will provide valuable resources to inform extension programming and the industry's ongoing efforts to improve stockperson training on dairy farms across the U.S.