Assessment of positive emotions in animals to improve their welfare

Boissy, Alain; Manteuffel, Gerhard; Jensen, Margit Bak; Moe, Randi Oppermann; Spruijt, Berry M.; Keeling, Linda J.; Winckler, Christoph; Forkman, Björn; Dimitrov, Ivan; Langbein, Jan; Bakken, Morten; Veissier, Isabelle; Aubert, Arnaud

doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2007.02.003

Cited by 1,155 publications

(1,039 citation statements)

References 237 publications

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“…It has been proposed that play indicates that the basic needs of the animal are met and its performance is intrinsically rewarding activity (Vanderschuren et al, 1997;Boissy et al, 2007). Therefore, play could be viewed as a behavioural indicator of stress in this context.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, play behaviour was recorded as it is a high-energy activity that is frequently reduced under stress (Muller-Schwarze et al, 1982;Siviy and Panksepp, 1985;Siviy and Atrens, 1992). Play is also thought to be an intrinsically rewarding activity and has been suggested as a potential indicator of positive emotion in animals (Vanderschuren et al, 1997;Boissy et al, 2007). Therefore, the inclusion of play observations in this study O'Connor, Parker, McLeman, Demmers, Lowe, Cui, Davey, Owen, Wathes and Abeyesinghe was intended to provide an insight into whether the pigs perceived the treatment conditions as stressful.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The impact of chronic environmental stressors on growing pigs, Sus scrofa (Part 1): stress physiology, production and play behaviour

O’Connor

Parker

McLeman

et al. 2010

Animal

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Commercially farmed animals are frequently housed in conditions that impose a number of concurrent environmental stressors. For pigs housed indoors, elevated levels of mechanical noise, atmospheric ammonia and low light intensities are commonplace. This experiment examined the effects on growing pigs of chronic exposure to combinations of commercially relevant levels of these potential stressors. Four-week-old hybrid female pigs (n 5 224) were housed under experimentally manipulated conditions of nominally either ,5 or 20 ppm atmospheric concentration of ammonia (24 h), a light intensity of 40 lux or 200 lux (12 h) and mechanical noise at either <60 or 80 dB(A) (24 h) for 15 weeks in a fully factorial arrangement (2 3 ) of treatments. The response of pigs to these environmental factors was assessed using a suite of physiological, production and behavioural measures. These included indicators of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activation such as salivary cortisol and adrenal morphometry, as well as body weight, food conversion efficiency and general health scores. Play behaviour was recorded as it is thought to be inversely related to stress. Chronic exposure to ammonia produced the strongest effect, shown by lower concentrations of salivary cortisol and larger adrenal cortices in the pigs reared under 20 ppm ammonia, which may have been indicative of a period of HPA activation leading to a downregulation of cortisol production. The pigs in the ammoniated rooms also performed less play behaviour than pigs in non-ammoniated rooms. There was evidence for an interaction between high noise and ammonia on the health scores of pigs and for brighter light to ameliorate the effect of ammonia on salivary cortisol. However, there was no measurable impact of these potential stressors on the productivity of the pigs or any of the other physiological parameters measured. We conclude that there should be little concern in terms of performance about the physical stressors tested here, within current European Union legal limits. However, 20 ppm ammonia may have had an adverse influence on the well-being of growing pigs. In this study, all other aspects of the pigs' husbandry were optimal; therefore, it is possible that under less favourable conditions, more pronounced effects of ammonia, noise and dim light would be observed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of chronic environmental stressors on growing pigs, Sus scrofa (Part 1): stress physiology, production and play behaviour

O’Connor

Parker

McLeman

et al. 2010

Animal

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“…Recent advances propose that welfare should move beyond the focusing on the absence of negative states to also encompass positive experiences or positive welfare (Boissy et al, 2007;Yeates and Main, 2008;Farm Animal Welfare Council, 2009). If welfare is thought of as a continuum from negative welfare at one end to positive welfare at the other, and if Absence of prolonged thirst is understood to be only associated with thirst and is the driver for the overall classification, the implication is that excellent farms can only be considered to reflect a neutral state of welfare, as an absence of suffering does not signify positive welfare (Yeates and Main, 2008).…”

Section: Heath Browne Mullan and Mainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Navigating the iceberg: reducing the number of parameters within the Welfare Quality® assessment protocol for dairy cows

Heath

Browne

Mullan

et al. 2014

Animal

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The Welfare Quality ® protocols provide a multidimensional assessment of welfare, which is lengthy, and hence limited in terms of practicality. The aim of this study was to investigate potential 'iceberg indicators' which could reliably predict the overall classification as a means of reducing the length of time for an assessment and so increase the feasibility of the Welfare Quality ® protocol as a multidimensional assessment of welfare. Full Welfare Quality ® assessments were carried out on 92 dairy farms in England and Wales. The farms were all classified as Acceptable or Enhanced. Logistic regression models with cross validation were used to compare model fit for the overall classification on farms. 'Absence of prolonged thirst', on its own, was found to correctly classify farms 88% of the time. More generally, the inclusion of more measures in the models was not associated with greater predictive ability for the overall classification. Absence of prolonged thirst could thus, in theory, be considered to be an iceberg indicator for the Welfare Quality ® protocol, and could reduce the length of time for a farm assessment to 15 min. Previous work has shown that the parameters within the Welfare Quality ® protocol are important and relevant for welfare assessment. However, it is argued that the credibility of the published aggregation system is compromised by the finding that one resource measure (Absence of prolonged thirst) is a major driver for the overall classification. It is therefore suggested that the prominence of Absence of prolonged thirst in this role may be better understood as an unintended consequence of the published measure aggregation system rather than as reflecting a realistic iceberg indicator.

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“…These stimuli vary in valence, that is, they are perceived as differing in their position on an axis ranging from negative to positive [2]. While humans can express their subjectively perceived emotions verbally, indicators are needed to assess emotional states in animals [9,10]. Locomotor activity [11], restlessness behaviour [12], and ear postures and movements [11][12][13][14][15] have been used as behavioural indicators of animal emotions in recent studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Housing conditions influence cortical and behavioural reactions of sheep in response to videos showing social interactions of different valence

Vögeli¹,

Wolf²,

Wechsler

et al. 2015

Behavioural Brain Research

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Mood, as a long-term affective state, is thought to modulate short-term emotional reactions in animals, but the details of this interplay have hardly been investigated experimentally. Apart from a basic interest in this affective system, mood is likely to have an important impact on animal welfare, as bad mood may taint all emotional experience. In the present study about mood -emotion interaction, 29 sheep were kept under predictable, stimulus-rich or unpredictable, stimulus-poor housing conditions, to induce different mood states. In an experiment, the animals were confronted with video sequences of social interactions of conspecifics showing agonistic interactions, ruminating or tolerantly co-feeding as stimuli of different valences. Emotional reactions were assessed by measuring frontal brain activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy and by recording behavioral reactions. Attentiveness of the sheep decreased from videos showing agonistic interactions toruminating sheep to those displaying co-feeding sheep. Seeing agonistic interactions was also associated with a deactivation of the frontal cortex, specifically in animals living under predictable, stimulus-rich housing conditions. These sheep generally showed less attentiveness and locomotor activity and they had their ears in a forward position less often and in a backward position more often than the sheep from the unpredictable, stimulus-poor conditions. Housing conditions influenced how the sheep behaved, which can either be thought to be mediated by mood or by the animals' previous experience with stimulusrichness in their housing conditions. Frontal cortical activity may not depend on valence only, but also on the perceptual channel through which the stimuli were perceived.

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Assessment of positive emotions in animals to improve their welfare

Cited by 1,155 publications

References 237 publications

The impact of chronic environmental stressors on growing pigs, Sus scrofa (Part 1): stress physiology, production and play behaviour

The impact of chronic environmental stressors on growing pigs, Sus scrofa (Part 1): stress physiology, production and play behaviour

Navigating the iceberg: reducing the number of parameters within the Welfare Quality® assessment protocol for dairy cows

Housing conditions influence cortical and behavioural reactions of sheep in response to videos showing social interactions of different valence

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