Digital dermatitis (Mortellaro's disease) is a painful bacterial infection of the hoof causing lameness across dairy and beef herds, requiring systematic herd-level control programs.
Digital dermatitis welfare involves painful progressive lesions affecting mobility and daily life for significant proportions of dairy herds. The pain from active lesions causes reduced feeding time, lying time, and social engagement - multiple welfare dimensions compromised simultaneously. Herd-level control programs that reduce prevalence from 30-40% to below 5% represent substantial aggregate welfare improvement across hundreds of individual animals. The welfare challenge is sustaining control programs over years rather than implementing them as a response to acute outbreaks and then allowing prevalence to rebuild.