Piglets' behaviour and performance in relation to sow characteristics.

The importance of maternal care in commercial pig production is largely ignored. The sow has little possibility to interact with her piglets, and piglets are often subjected to early weaning or artificial rearing. This study aimed to investigate aspects of physiological and behavioural maternal provisioning that contribute to offspring outcomes.

Stage 1 Registered Report: Refinement of tickling protocols to improve positive animal welfare in laboratory rats.

Rat tickling is a heterospecific interaction for experimenters to mimic the interactions of rat play, where they produce 50 kHz ultrasonic vocalisations (USV), symptoms of positive affect; tickling can improve laboratory rat welfare. The standard rat tickling protocol involves gently pinning the rat in a supine position. However, individual response to this protocol varies.

Defining the pig microglial transcriptome reveals its core signature, regional heterogeneity, and similarity with human and rodent microglia.

Microglia play key roles in brain homeostasis as well as responses to neurodegeneration and neuroinflammatory processes caused by physical disease and psychosocial stress. The pig is a physiologically relevant model species for studying human neurological disorders, many of which are associated with microglial dysfunction. Furthermore, pigs are an important agricultural species, and there is a need to understand how microglial function affects their welfare.

Sex differences in 50 kHz call subtypes emitted during tickling-induced playful behaviour in rats.

'Tickling' induces positive affective states in laboratory rats as evidenced by the production of 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalisations (USVs), although this has mostly been investigated in males. Juvenile rats emit distinctive 50-kHz USV subtypes. Frequency-modulated (FM) 50-kHz USVs are thought to be associated with positive affect and flat 50-kHz USVs with social communication.

Happy or healthy? How members of the public prioritise farm animal health and natural behaviours.

The importance given to minimising health issues and promoting natural behaviours is a polarising issue within farm animal welfare. It is predominantly thought that members of the public prioritise animals being able to behave naturally over other aspects of farm animal welfare, such as addressing health issues. However, public perspectives may be more multi-dimensional than is generally thought, with the importance given to these different elements of welfare dependent on the situation and state of the animals in question.

Negative play contagion in calves.

Play is a strong outwardly directed, emotional behaviour and can contagiously spread between individuals. It has been suggested that high-playing animals could 'seed' play in others, spreading positive affective states. Despite the current interest in play contagion there has been no previous attempt to measure the strength of the play contagion effect.

Prioritization of Farm Animal Welfare Issues Using Expert Consensus.

Prioritization of animal welfare issues can help identify which areas most require research funding and raise awareness of best practices. A modified Delphi method was used to obtain expert opinion on the highest priority welfare issues for UK farmed livestock. Fifty-eight UK-based experts were recruited onto the study, with a minimum of 3 years experience of working with either cattle, pigs, poultry, or small ruminants (12-16 experts per group).

What Is so Positive about Positive Animal Welfare?-A Critical Review of the Literature.

It is claimed that positive animal welfare (PAW) developed over the last decade in reaction to animal welfare focusing too much on avoiding negatives. However, it remains unclear what PAW adds to the animal welfare literature and to what extent its ideas are new. Through a critical review of the PAW literature, we aim to separate different aspects of PAW and situate it in relation to the traditional animal welfare literature.

Odour conditioning of positive affective states: Rats can learn to associate an odour with being tickled.

Most associative learning tests in rodents use negative stimuli, such as electric shocks. We investigated if young rats can learn to associate the presence of an odour with the experience of being tickled (i.e.

Associations between Oxytocin Receptor Gene Polymorphisms, Empathy towards Animals and Implicit Associations towards Animals.

Oxytocin has been well researched in association with psychological variables and is widely accepted as a key modulator of human social behaviour. Previous work indicates involvement of oxytocin receptor gene () single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in human-human empathy, however little is known about associations of SNPs with empathy and affective reactions of humans towards animals. Five SNPs previously found to associate with human social behaviour were genotyped in 161 students.

Understanding Adolescents' Categorisation of Animal Species.

Categorisations are a means of investigating cognitive maps. The present study, for the first time, investigates adolescents' spontaneous categorisation of 34 animal species. Furthermore, explicit evaluations of 16 selected animals in terms of their perceived utility and likeability were analysed.

Up-regulation of IGF-1 in the frontal cortex of piglets exposed to an environmentally enriched arena.

Environmental enrichment (EE) is widely used in the life sciences to study effects of environment on the brain. In pigs, despite lack of EE being a key welfare issue there is little understanding of brain effects of EE in pigs. This project aimed to study the effects of exposure to an EE arena on piglet behaviours and on brain gene expression levels with a focus on IGF-1 and related genes.

Evidence for litter differences in play behaviour in pre-weaned pigs.

The aim of this study was to analyse spontaneous play behaviour in litters of domestic pigs () for sources of variation at individual and litter levels and to relate variation in play to measures of pre and postnatal development. Seven litters of commercially bred piglets ( = 70) were born (farrowed) within a penning system (PigSAFE) that provided opportunities for the performance of spontaneous play behaviours. Individual behaviour was scored based on an established play ethogram for 2 days per week over the 3 week study period.

Prenatal stress produces anxiety prone female offspring and impaired maternal behaviour in the domestic pig.

Numerous studies have shown that prenatal stress (PNS) can have profound effects on postnatal well-being. Here, the domestic pig (Sus scrofa) was used to investigate PNS effects owing to the direct relevance for farm animal welfare and the developing status of the pig as a large animal model in translational research. Pregnant primiparous sows were exposed, in mid-gestation, to either a social stressor (mixing with unfamiliar conspecifics) or were kept in stable social groups.

Qualitative Behavioural Assessment of emotionality in pigs.

Scientific assessment of affective states in animals is challenging but vital for animal welfare studies. One possible approach is Qualitative Behavioural Assessment (QBA), a 'whole animal' methodology which integrates information from multiple behavioural signals and styles of behavioural expression (body language) directly in terms of an animal's emotional expression. If QBA provides a valid measure of animals' emotional state it should distinguish between groups where emotional states have been manipulated.

Pre-natal social stress and post-natal pain affect the developing pig reproductive axis.

This study assessed the effect of pre-natal social stress and post-natal pain on the reproductive development of young (approximately day 40) pigs. Male pigs carried by sows that were stressed by mixing with unfamiliar older sows for two 1-week periods during mid-pregnancy had lower plasma testosterone (0.54 vs 0.

The impact of prenatal stress on basal nociception and evoked responses to tail-docking and inflammatory challenge in juvenile pigs.

The consequences of tail-docking (at 2-4 days) and prenatal stress (maternal social stress during the 2nd third of pregnancy) on baseline nociceptive thresholds and responses to acute inflammatory challenge were investigated in juvenile pigs in two studies. Nociceptive thresholds were assessed on the tail root and on the hind foot using noxious mechanical and cold stimulation before and after acute inflammatory challenge by intradermal injection of 30 μg capsaicin (study 1) or 3% carrageenan (study 2) into the tail root. Four groups of 8 (study 1, n=14-16 pigs/treatment) or 5 (study 2, n=6 pigs/treatment/sex) week-old pigs were exposed to the main factors: maternal stress and treatment (docked vs.

Emotionality in growing pigs: is the open field a valid test?

The ability to assess emotionality is important within animal welfare research. Yet, for farm animals, few tests of emotionality have been well validated. Here we investigated the construct validity of behavioural measures of pig emotionality in an open-field test by manipulating the experiences of pigs in three ways.

Pre-natal stress amplifies the immediate behavioural responses to acute pain in piglets.

Pre-natal stress (PNS) or undernutrition can have numerous effects on an individual's biology throughout their lifetime. Some of these effects may be adaptive by allowing individuals to tailor their phenotype to environmental conditions. Here we investigated, in the domestic pig Sus scrofa, whether one possible consequence of a predicted adverse environment could be altered pain perception.

A comparison of management practices, farmer-perceived disease incidence and winter housing on organic and non-organic dairy farms in the UK.

There have been increases in the number of organic dairy farms in the UK in recent years. However, there is little information on the impact of organic regulations on cow welfare. As part of a larger study, we aimed to investigate differences between organic and non-organic farms in management practices and winter housing quality.

Early weaning results in less active behaviour, accompanied by lower 5-HT1A and higher 5-HT2A receptor mRNA expression in specific brain regions of female pigs.

In rodents and humans stressful events in early life e.g. maternal deprivation, can increase sensitivity to stress in later life.

Lameness prevalence and risk factors in organic and non-organic dairy herds in the United Kingdom.

This study aimed to compare the prevalence of lameness on organic and non-organic dairy farms in the United Kingdom (UK) and to assess which cow and farm factors influenced lameness levels. Forty organic and 40 non-organic dairy farms across the UK were repeatedly visited over a 2.5 year period.

The responses of growing pigs to a chronic-intermittent stress treatment.

Many of the stressor treatments used in animal models of depression have parallels in the normal experiences of domestic pigs. The experiment described here aimed to assess whether a chronic-intermittent stress regime caused behavioural or physiological changes, indicative of depression, in domestic pigs. Ten juvenile male pigs were exposed to a social and environmental stress regime.