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Data are available in the scientific literature concerning the quality and usefulness of donkey milk for human consumption. However, there is a lack of studies related to the understanding of the welfare of dairy donkeys. The only attempt, at a European Union level, to assess the welfare of donkeys is that of the Animal Welfare Indicator's (AWIN) welfare assessment protocol for donkeys, where the appropriate nutrition welfare criteria have been assessed, but only through the evaluation of the body condition score. However, several other indicators that take into account the importance of good feeding welfare principles should be considered for the correct management of dairy donkeys. Therefore, it is hoped that this review of the available scientific literature will be useful to help establish a set of appropriate welfare requirements and indicators for the management of dairy donkeys. The review is aimed at identifying and discussing other requirements and indicators, such as nutritional requirements, farm management requirements and animal-based indicators, which may be important for the correct assessment of the appropriate nutrition welfare criteria and to establish best practices for the feeding of dairy donkeys.

Simple Summary: Traditional in vivo methods of determining digestibility of feeds are expensive and time-consuming, and very few data are available for donkeys. The aim of this study was to verify if the in vitro method developed for the Ankom DaisyII Incubator could produce accurate estimates of the in vivo dry matter and neutral detergent fiber digestibility of diets fed to donkeys. Four donkeys and four diets were used in the trial, and the experiment was repeated four times. Buffered donkey feces were used as an inoculum source for the assessment of digestibility in vitro, with an incubation time of 60 h. The obtained results showed that the Ankom DaisyII Incubator ranked the diets in the same order as the in vivo method. However, in vitro values were lower than those obtained in vivo. The regression analyses used to predict in vivo estimates from in vitro data gave poor results and low precision. In conclusion, further studies, using different sample size and digestion times in vitro, are needed to verify if accurate prediction of in vivo feed digestibility can be obtained using the Ankom DaisyII Incubator and donkey feces as inoculum. We compared in vivo and in vitro dry matter (DM) and neutral detergent fiber (NDF) digestibility in donkeys using feces as microbial inoculum. Four donkeys were used in a 4 × 4 Latin square design with a 2 × 2 factorial arrangement of treatments. The animals were fed two types of hay, with or without flaked barley. For the in vivo procedure, total feces were collected for 6 days from each donkey; digestibility was calculated as the difference between ingested and excreted DM and NDF. For the in vitro procedure, donkey feces were buffered and used as microbial inoculum in an Ankom DaisyII Incubator; digestibility was estimated after 60 h of incubation. In vivo results showed that the addition of barley to hays did not change the digestibility values. In vivo estimates were higher than in vitro ones. The equations used to predict in vivo estimates from in vitro data were not reliable (R2 = 0.47 and 0.21; P = 0.003 and 0.078 for NDF and DM digestibility, respectively). Further studies need to evaluate different sample size and digestion times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]