Farmer attitudes to injurious pecking in laying hens and to potential control strategies

Abstract

21Farmers' recognition of health and welfare problems, and their responses to related intervention programmes 22 such as those to reduce injurious pecking (IP) in hens, directly influence the welfare of animals in their care. 23Changing those responses can be achieved through a re-positioning of social drivers as well as from individual 24 behaviour. This study begins by considering how certain levels of plumage damage become normalised while 25 others might be considered unacceptable. Drawing upon in-depth farmer interviews, the study investigates 26 how management practices for addressing the issue of IP are developed and enacted, looking at the relative 27 2 influence of intrinsic and extrinsic individual behavioural factors. Twelve farmers with varied uptake of 28 evidence-based management strategies designed to reduce levels of IP were interviewed. Although farmers 29 ranked images of flocks with various levels of plumage damage in a similar order to scientists, their 30 perception of levels of IP in their own flocks varied, and was not consistently associated with the actual levels 31 measured. Most farmers recognised both financial and welfare implications of IP and expressed pride in 32 having a good-looking flock. The popular management strategies were those designed to redirect pecking to 33 other objects, whereas a substantial barrier to uptake was the perception of creating other problems: for 34 example mislaid eggs if early access to litter and range were adopted. To achieve uptake of knowledge that 35 improves animal welfare on farm it may be necessary both to shift the norms perceived as acceptable, and to 36 overcome barriers to change that include lack of time and understanding, by providing impartial advice and 37 facilitation of ownership of the issues. 38 39

Development of a Scoring System to Assess Feather Damage in Canadian Laying Hen Flocks

“…With respect to the literature, an inter-observer WK of 0.88 was reached for the back area between researchers, similar to values reported by Kjaer et al [13], who found a WK of 0.82 between researcher teams using a visual assessment of plumage damage. Between farmers, lower values were reported (kappa of 0.50) when ranking photographs of FD damage only [27]. Some variation between assessors’ perceptions as to what is considered an acceptable level of FD is also unavoidable [12,27]; therefore, written descriptions and visual depictions of each score were included in the final system.…”

“…Between farmers, lower values were reported (kappa of 0.50) when ranking photographs of FD damage only [27]. Some variation between assessors’ perceptions as to what is considered an acceptable level of FD is also unavoidable [12,27]; therefore, written descriptions and visual depictions of each score were included in the final system. In a trial of the modified system with the accompanying scoring guide, the three Arkell staff members who scored 50 birds within the same room containing approximately 700 birds (and, thus, likely scored different birds) found a fairly similar FD prevalence suggesting that it gave a reasonable representation of all birds within the room.…”

Factors that Influence Farmers’ Views on Farm Animal Welfare: A Semi-Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis

“…Other important factors that influenced FAW improvement is the space and workload required to address animals' needs [84,93,94]. Several authors have reported that farmers were reluctant to applying evidence-based FAW recommendations when it had implications for labour, space and time investment, regardless of the production system [9,16,72,76,77,81,86,[94][95][96][97][98]. In contrast FAW interventions that could be carried out quickly, in a time-efficient manner, were reported to be easily adopted by farmers [86].…”

Towards Farm Animal Welfare and Sustainability

“…It is happening with the expanding incorporation of welfare criteria in environmental certification and assurance schemes, but these are often limited to relatively high-end food supply chains [ 55 , 56 ]. It is also happening in some of the more innovative responses to legislative change, for example in schemes to enable the enrichment of laying hens following the banning of beak-trimming in the EU [ 57 ] and in the emergence of free farrowing systems for pigs following the EU ban on farrowing crates [ 58 ].…”