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Assessing Farm Animal Welfare: A Novel 'Body Language' Approach
Published: Tue, 11 Jan 2005
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Research Note Full Title
Assessing farm animal welfare: a novel 'body language' approach
Objectives
A method for the qualitative assessment of animal behaviour and welfare
‘Body language’ is an expression of the whole animal: how it holds itself, moves about, and interacts with its surroundings. An animal may for example behave in a way that appears calm, nervous, tense, relaxed or distressed.
Scientists at SAC have developed a method to assess such expressive states. Based on "Free Choice Profiling" techniques developed in food science, this method instructs observers to generate their own descriptive terms, and to then use these terms to quantify an animal’s expressions.
Research with pigs and dairy cattle using this technique has shown that observers reliably agree in their assessment of animal body language, even when they are from different backgrounds (e.g. farmers, veterinarians, animal protectionists).The significant correlation of these assessments to conventional quantitative measures of behaviour further supports the validity of judgements of animal body language.
Current research is investigating how such judgements correlate to physiological indicators of animal welfare (e.g. heart rate, saliva cortisol).
Approach
The aim of this research is to develop a practical, intuitively plausible method of animal welfare assessment.
Research on farms by SAC has demonstrated that observers can effectively apply this method to animals in groups, and are not unduly biased by the environment in which animals are assessed.
Current research is investigating whether and how different housing systems affect the body language of farm animals, and what this tells us about their welfare. This includes a collaboration with State Veterinary Inspectors, who will test this method in light of their on farm welfare surveillance work. The proposed approach also recognises the skills of farmers and stock(wo)men in reading their animals’ body language.
Generally the benefit of this approach lies in validating the practical knowledge that people working with animals already have, and in giving it a formal measurement base.