Dairy sheep are farmed across Southern Europe, the Middle East, and increasingly worldwide for milk used in cheeses like Roquefort and feta, yet their welfare receives far less attention than dairy cattle or goats.
Dairy sheep welfare occupies a gap in both research and regulatory attention. The species is often treated as lower priority than dairy cattle because individual animals have lower economic value and welfare science has been slower to develop species-specific tools. Yet dairy sheep experience the same fundamental welfare challenges as other dairy species: the pain of mastitis, the stress of mother-offspring separation, the physiological demands of high milk production, and the risks of lameness and respiratory disease in indoor housing. The lack of validated welfare assessment protocols for sheep means that systematic on-farm welfare monitoring is less developed, leaving individual suffering largely invisible to supply chains.