The ways in which humans can support good welfare for animals in their care is an ongoing subject of debate: some place emphasis on the animals’ physical health; others, on animals’ ability to live “natural...
Pain in response to tissue damage functions to change behaviour so that further damage is minimised whereas healing and survival are promoted. This paper focuses on the behavioural criteria that match the function to ask...
Cognitive approaches are increasingly used to assess animal welfare, but no systematic review has been conducted on pigs despite their cognitive capacities. Our aims were two-fold: first, to assess the popularity and heterogeneity of this...
The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of tactile stimuli and music during daily milking on the productive, physiological, well-being, and health parameters of dairy cows. The experiment, which lasted 39 days...
Automated assessment of broiler chicken welfare poses particular problems due to the large numbers of birds involved and the variety of different welfare measures that have been proposed. Active (sustained, defect-free) walking is both a...
Welfare assessment currently is less well-characterized for aquatic animals and the classical methodologies used for terrestrial animals are not adequate to improve our knowledge about fish well-being. Among different approaches, the status of organism responses...
This study aimed to expand knowledge on lumpfish stress physiology by investigating the effects of acute stress on primary (i.e., cortisol) and secondary (e.g., metabolites) stress responses, as well as oxidative stress biomarkers, from stress...
Background Tail inspection in the abattoir is a tool to help determine the welfare status of pigs. However, methodologies vary widely. Moreover, meat inspection is moving from palpation and incision towards visual-only (VIS) examination. This...
Background Management of pain is critical to improve the welfare of farmed livestock and meet consumer expectations. There is limited published information about the use of analgesic drugs in the sheep sector. Methods A mixed-method...
In the last decades, an engineering process has deeply transformed livestock houses by introducing fine-tuned climate control systems to guarantee adequate indoor climate conditions needed to express the maximum genetic potential of animals and to...