Listening to those who can’t talk:

Ensuring positive welfare on-farm is essential for not only animal well-being and productivity but also consumer-producer relations. However, how animals feel is difficult to discern as they cannot self-report. It is therefore important to identify when animals are in positive affective states to ensure dairy cattle experience a "life worth living". Qualitative behaviour assessments are promising to evaluate positive emotions in cattle and are currently incorporated into many welfare assessments, but other measures are worth exploring to improve validity and repeatability of assessments. Currently, adult dairy cattle are housed in groups and are usually provided with enrichment in the form or brushes, deep bedding, or sprinklers, all with the aim to improve their welfare. 

​

The objective of this study was to validate behavioural and physiological measures of positive affective states in adult dairy cattle.

​

This study included 13 dry cows and 5 heifers who were each subjected to 3 treatments: positive, neutral, and negative. Animals were moved from their group-housed home pens to individual treatments pens, where treatments were applied in random order, with one treatment applied each day for 45 min and 1 washout day between treatments. During each treatment period, we collected behavioural and physiological measures using biosensors, live observations, and RGB video recordings. Animals were then moved to a test pen, passing by a thermal camera before completing various behaviour tests with continuous RGB video recording. A single trained observer who was blind to treatments assessed the outcomes in the test pen.

 

The results indicate that the positive treatment positively influenced the cattle’s emotional well-being. Further analysis revealed both physiological and behavioural (eye area temperature (P=0.003) and indifference (P=0.02), respectively) measures are sensitive to this change in the positive direction. These findings are the first step towards on-farm monitoring system and indicate the feasibility of measuring various physiological and behavioural indicators of adult dairy cattle.