Mastitis — infection of the udder — is the most economically significant and welfare-damaging disease in dairy cattle globally. Addressing its welfare burden requires both better treatment and prevention through improved husbandry.
Mastitis is the most prevalent source of acute pain in dairy cattle and one of the most significant welfare concerns in the entire food animal sector. Clinical mastitis involves intense, sustained pain from udder inflammation — affected cows show reduced feed intake, reluctance to move, and clear signs of systemic illness. The chronic subclinical form, while less visible, causes ongoing discomfort and immune system strain. The scale of the problem — hundreds of millions of cases annually across the global dairy herd — makes mastitis reduction one of the highest-impact welfare interventions available. Prevention through housing design (comfortable, dry lying areas that reduce udder contamination), milking hygiene, teat dipping protocols, and early detection technology is more effective than treatment alone. Critically, selection for extreme milk yield — which drives udder conformation problems and metabolic stress — is a root cause that breeding programmes are only slowly beginning to address.