Footrot is one of the most significant welfare problems in sheep globally, causing severe lameness and prolonged pain. It is caused by the interaction of Fusobacterium necrophorum and Dichelobacter nodosus, and affects sheep in wet conditions worldwide. Management is complex, and inadequate treatment perpetuates animal suffering.
Footrot causes intense, chronic pain. Affected sheep exhibit classic lameness behaviors: reluctance to walk, kneeling while grazing, weight shifting, and reduced feed intake. Algometry and pain biomarker studies confirm that lame sheep experience pain comparable to other inflammatory conditions. Chronic footrot can persist for months without treatment, causing extended suffering, body condition loss, and reproductive failure in ewes.
Footrot affects 5-15% of sheep in affected flocks in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. In high-risk environments with wet conditions, prevalence may reach 20-40% without proactive management. The welfare cost is enormous — even conservative estimates suggest millions of sheep suffer from painful lameness at any given time.
Effective treatment requires correct diagnosis (distinguishing virulent footrot from benign footrot, interdigital dermatitis, and foot abscess) followed by foot trimming, topical treatment, systemic antibiotics for virulent cases, and pain relief. Anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are a welfare priority — analgesic treatment significantly reduces pain and improves recovery speed.
A welfare failure in many production systems is reluctance to treat individual animals with systemic antibiotics or pain relief due to cost or perceived difficulty. This is ethically unacceptable given the degree of suffering involved.
Prevention is the most welfare-effective approach. Key strategies include:
The UK's Five-Point Plan for lameness control — record, reduce, treat, vaccinate, breed — has been validated as an effective framework for reducing footrot prevalence below 2%. Widespread adoption of this framework has improved welfare in UK sheep flocks, though uptake remains incomplete.
Mobility scoring — systematically assessing the gait of sheep in the flock — is essential for welfare monitoring and early intervention. Flocks with regular mobility scoring have significantly lower lameness prevalence than those without systematic assessment. Mobility scoring should be a routine part of sheep welfare management.