Stockmanship and Farm Animal Welfare

By X. Boivin, J. Lensink, C. Tallet, I. Veissier. Animal Welfare, 2003

188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human factors (attitudes, personality traits, self-esteem, job satisfaction) strongly determine our behaviour towards animals, animal production and animal welfare. Recent studies have emphasised positive human contacts as indicators of a stockperson's positive attitude towards animals and towards animal welfare in general. Stockmanship can be improved by careful selection of people and/or by training. However, little is known of the biological basis of the effect of stock handling procedures on the welfare of animals. The animal's perception of the stockperson (based both on emotional responses and cognitive aspects such as anticipation, recognition and categorisation), and the existence of sensitive periods in an animal's life, need to be explored in more depth, especially under farm conditions. We need to consider the complexity of human behaviour (eg husbandry practices, balance between positive and negative interactions, predictability, controllability) and its effect on animal welfare from the animal's point of view throughout its whole life. This paper identifies the importance of positive human contacts for both animals and stockpeople, and highlights the challenge to maintain such positive contacts despite the trend in modern agriculture to increase the number of animals per stockperson. This requires better knowledge of animal genetics, socialisation to humans during sensitive periods, and management of the social group. We emphasise the ethical importance of the human-animal relationship in the context of farm animal welfare and productivity.

Subfields: Genetics, Small Animals, Speech and Hearing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57dbcf2f183a1bb5582cf13adfa9efe362a1f40d

How researchers see this paper

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In Genetics

1. X. Boivin
2. D. Broom
3. G. Hosey

In Small Animals

1. X. Boivin
2. D. Broom
3. G. Hosey

Citations in the corpus

• Effects of human-animal relationship on animal productivity and welfare (2020, background): “The nature of human contact can significantly modulate how farm animals perceive humans, affecting their behavioural responses (for a review, see Boivin et al 2003; Waiblinger et al 2006; Adler et al 2019).”
• Human-animal interactions, relationships and bonds: a review and analysis of the literature (2014, unknown): “Explanations of the consequences of HAI/HAR in agricultural animals have been interpreted in terms of the animals perceiving humans as either predators or conspecifics (Boivin et al., 2003), a hypothesis which actually dates back to the views of Hediger (1965, 1970) with respect to zoo animals.”
• Assessing the human-animal relationship in farmed species: a critical review (2006, background): “The period of the animal’s life during which human contact occurs can be important, although conflicting results have caused debate (Jones, 1995b; Burrow, 1997; Boivin et al., 2003).”