Review: Towards an integrated concept of animal welfare.

Animal welfare is an important field of study due to animal sentience, yet there is to date no consensus on the definition of animal welfare. There have been four key developments in the field of animal welfare science since its birth: the theoretical and empirical study of affective states, and hence our understanding thereof, has increased; there has been a shift from a primary focus on unpleasant experiences towards an inclusion of pleasant experiences; there has been an increasing mention and investigation of the notion of cumulation of experiences in time, and with this, the importance of the time component of both affective states and animal welfare has come forward. Following others, we define welfare as a balance or cumulation of pleasant and unpleasant experiences over time.

Impact of Enrichment and Repeated Mixing on Resilience in Pigs.

Resilience, the capacity of animals to be minimally affected by a disturbance or to rapidly bounce back to the state before the challenge, may be improved by enrichment, but negatively impacted by a high allostatic load from stressful management procedures in pigs. We investigated the combined effects of diverging environmental conditions from weaning and repeated mixing to create high allostatic load on resilience of pigs. Pigs were either exposed to barren housing conditions (B) from weaning onwards or provided with sawdust, extra toys, regular access to a "play arena" and daily positive human contact (E).

Assessing the Effectiveness of Providing Live Black Soldier Fly Larvae () to Ease the Weaning Transition of Piglets.

Weaning is a stressful event for piglets, involving substantial changes to their nutritional and social environment. Providing edible enrichment around weaning may ease the weaning transition by increasing pre-weaning feed intake and improving post-weaning performance, health, behavior, and affective state. In this study, we investigated the effects of providing live black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) as edible enrichment pre- and/or post-weaning.

Pigs Like It Varied; Feeding Behavior and Pre- and Post-weaning Performance of Piglets Exposed to Dietary Diversity and Feed Hidden in Substrate During Lactation.

Timely intake of solid feed is essential to ease the nutritional change from sow's milk to solid feed at weaning and thereby to reduce weaning-related problems. A significant percentage of piglets, however, do not or hardly consume solid feed before weaning. We studied effects of dietary variety and presenting the feed in substrate during lactation on the feeding behavior and performance of piglets up to 2 weeks post-weaning.

Cloning and analysis of cDNAs encoding the hypusine-containing protein eIF5A of two lepidopteran insect species.

Eukaryotic initiation factor eIF5A is essential for cell viability and contains a characteristic post-translational modification of a specific lysine residue into a hypusine. cDNAs with similarity to eIF5A sequences were derived from Spodoptera exigua and S. frugiperda cDNA libraries.