Robustness as a breeding goal and its relation with health, welfare and integrity

The combination of breeding for increased production and the intensification of housing conditions have resulted in increased occurrence of behavioural, physiological, and immunological disorders in production animals. These disorders affect health and welfare of production animals negatively. For future livestock systems, it is important to consider how to manage and breed production animals. In this paper we develop the concept of robustness as a breeding goal. Improving robustness by selective breeding will increase (or restore) the animals' ability to interact successfully with the environment and thereby to make the animal better able to adapt to an appropriate husbandry system. This, in turn, is likely to improve both welfare and productivity, although this also depends on management and housing conditions. Therefore, in order to breed for sustainable and social acceptable production systems, animal production should accept robustness as a breeding goal.