Using behaviour to assess animal welfare

By Marian S. Dawkins. Animal Welfare, 2004

382 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rather than construct lists of many different welfare indicators and give each of them the same weight, I argue that the assessment of animal welfare should be directed at answering two key questions: I) Are the animals healthy? 2) Do they have what they want? Behaviour has a major role in answering both. Behaviour is currently used to help answer the first question through its use in the clinical and pre-clinical assessment of pain, injury and disease, and potentially could have an even greater role, particularly if used in conjunction with new technology. Behaviour is also of crucial importance in gauging what animals want, most obviously in the use of choice and preference tests, but also through other methods that are particularly suitable for on-farm welfare assessment. These include quantitative observations of the spatial distribution of animals and of behavioural ‘indicators’ of what animals want, such as vocalisations.

Subfields: Animal Science and Zoology, Genetics, Small Animals

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fcc52f980d5ca87060494ec5a79d045c7427ee50

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Animal Science and Zoology

1. Rui F. Oliveira
2. D. Broom
3. Michael W. Davis
4. L. Galhardo

In Genetics

1. Rui F. Oliveira
2. D. Broom
3. Michael W. Davis
4. L. Galhardo

In Small Animals

1. L. Riley
2. P. Rose
3. Rui F. Oliveira
4. Steven M. Nash
5. D. Broom
6. Michael W. Davis
7. L. Galhardo

Citations in the corpus

• Viewpoint: Regulating meat consumption to improve health, the environment and animal welfare (2020, background): “Interestingly, an emerging literature in animal sciences uses―also used in economics―a revealed preferences approach, where animals’ preferences are inferred from their choices (Dawkins, 2004).”
• To pace or not to pace? A review of what abnormal repetitive behavior tells us about zoo animal management (2017, background): “Season will still affect motivation to travel in migratory species, despite caging (Dawkins, 2004).”
• Psychological Stress and Welfare in Fish (2009, background): “These facts have relevant implications for fish welfare considerations, since the animals’ perception of their own circumstances is a key aspect of the whole concept of welfare (Dawkins, 1990, 2004).”
• Cognitive ability and awareness in domestic animals and decisions about obligations to animals (2010, background): “Following the question of whether or not animals can suffer, posed by Bentham (1789), the importance of feelings, in particular in relation to animal welfare, has been emphasised by Duncan (1993), Dawkins (1993, 2004) and Panksepp (1998).”
• Application of the Welfare Quality protocol to assess growing pigs kept under intensive conditions in Spain (2011, background): “It is a generally accepted fact that welfare comprises physical and mental health (Webster et al., 2004; Dawkins, 2004) and that it includes several aspects such as absence of thirst, hunger, discomfort, disease, pain and injuries, stress, and presence of normal behavioral expressions (Farm Animal W”
• Fish stress and mortality can be predicted using reflex impairment (2010, methodology): “Technical personnel in field operations routinely observe spontaneous activity, responsiveness and gross wounding or infection as pre-clinical signs of fish vitality, and subsequently make intuitive decisions about welfare, health care and culture conditions based on previous experience of mortality”