Lameness is the third most important welfare problem in dairy cattle. Mobility scoring provides an objective tool for farmers to identify, treat, and reduce lameness across herds.
Cattle lameness is a welfare problem of enormous scale: millions of dairy cows experience chronic foot pain that impairs their ability to move, feed, and rest comfortably. The normalization of high lameness prevalence as an inevitable production cost reflects a failure of welfare standards and incentive structures. Mobility scoring provides an objective, practicable tool for identifying and tracking lameness, but it only improves welfare when paired with action — treatment of lame individuals and systematic improvement of the environmental factors that drive lameness at herd level.