Footrot is a painful, contagious bacterial infection of sheep hooves affecting welfare and production across global sheep farming. Effective prevention and treatment require proactive flock health management.
Footrot causes chronic lameness that sheep must endure during all their daily activities including grazing, moving to water, and escaping predators. Lame ewes have reduced reproductive performance and are more vulnerable to other welfare problems including flystrike. The condition is painful and treatable — early individual treatment with antibiotics combined with hoof trimming resolves most cases. Flock-level management through vaccination, dry pasture management, and culling of persistently infected animals reduces prevalence sustainably. Welfare monitoring programs that include locomotion scoring for sheep — equivalent to those used in dairy cattle — would significantly improve detection and treatment rates.