Experience of opportunities and threats and its relationship with emotion and welfare of finishing pigs.
1. Experience of opportunities and threats and its relationship with
emotion and welfare of finishing pigs
Abstract:
Animal welfare is considered to be strongly affected by subjective experience and the consequential
emotional state (Imfeld-Mueller et al 2011). Mendl et al (2010) described an emotional framework
which emphasized that affective states are strongly influenced by the organism's environment. They
suggested that individuals experiencing a high threat, low opportunity environment will experience
more negative emotions, causing a more negative affective state, compared to individuals in a high
opportunity and low threat environment. The aim of this investigation is to develop and pilot
methods for classifying environments in terms of threats and opportunities and to ascertain if
emotion and welfare are affected by these varying threat/opportunity environments.
Quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted to analyse 37 video clips of finishing pigs to
identify a link between external stimuli and internal states. Environments were assessed using a
threat/opportunity analysis as well as recording of event behaviours, oral behaviours and rising and
moving restrictions, to compare with the threat/opportunity analysis. Affective state was assessed
using qualitative behaviour analysis (QBA), as described by Wemelsfelder (2007), which involved the
assignment of descriptive terms to a pen of pigs to describe how they are behaving.
QBA correlated with threats, social event behaviours, positive event behaviours and moving
restrictions. No significant correlations were found between QBA with either the opportunity or the
opportunity/threat ratio.
This investigation concludes that suitable methods for classifying the environments of finishing pigs
in terms of threats and opportunities are: the examination of social event behaviours, positive event
behaviours, moving restrictions and the measurement of threats in a pig’s environment. More
research must be undertaken on the definition and recording of opportunity to enable
measurements of well-being and not simply freedom from.
