As we all are aware that safe and quality milk is being produced from healthy animals using management practices that are sustainable from an animal welfare, social, economic and environmental perspective. This study was carried out to fi nd out the common animal welfare practices being practiced by randomly selected 120 dairy farmers in the four blocks of Kathua district of Jammu and Kashmir state of India. For the study, a door to door survey was conducted using semi-structured interview schedule to collect primary data on various dairy animal welfare practices like calf rearing, feeding, housing, breeding, health care and milking welfare keeping in mind the “Five Freedoms” concept for animal welfare. Data from the study revealed that 100 percent of the farmers took care of the calves at the time of birth, provided colostrums (44%) after the removal of placentaand fed milk to their calves for more than four months after birth, but as far as total calf welfare was concerned they were not practicing cutting, ligation and disinfection of naval cord as required. They were also providing necessary amount of greens and concentrates to their animals and in some parts of district, they had maintained the standards of feeding welfare by exposing their animals to green pastures. Majority of the respondents had constructed a separate (54%) and well directed (61%) houses for their animals. Height of the shelters was suffi cient (67%) and had kacha fl oor (51%) in their animal sheds. Regarding the breeding welfare practices, majority of the respondents were practicing artifi cial insemination method and also got their animals examined after 90 days of insemination, which was a good breeding welfare practice. Majority of them had provided proper prophylactic measures to their animals from contagious diseases for their health welfare. They were milking their animals twice a day in the same place where they usually tied them. Majority of them were following good milking welfare practices by

cleaning their hands, utensils and udder of the animal before milk