Introduction

Background

Ensuring positive welfare on-farm is essential for not only animal well-being but animal productivity and consumer-producer relations. When animals are happy, they are better producers and farmers benefit financially but also socially, as they can stand behind their product and farm operations knowing that they are providing their animals with a life worth living. Conscientious consumerism also encourages animal products to be sourced from "happy animals" instead of "animals that are not in distress". Animal welfare refers to how an animal is coping with the conditions in which it lives with respect to 3 domains (fig. 1): natural living, biological functioning and health, and affective states (emotional well-being). Affective states are an animal's physiological and behavioural response to their environment. Affect can be described along two axis' (fig. 2), arousal (high or low intensity) and valence (positive or negative).

There are regulatory bodies (for example: National Farm Animal Care Council) ensuring an animal experiences a life free from distress, discomfort, hunger and thirst, pain/injury/disease, and the freedom to express normal behaviours. While it is understood that farming practices should not result in animals being in negative affective states, or if they do, to find ways to return the animal to a neutral state as soon as possible (e.g., pain control for the dehorning procedures in dairy calves), there is a lack of understanding on how to ensure animals are in a positive affective state. Beyond daily husbandry and quality care (to address the physical health/well-being of cows), dairy farmers currently use enrichments to further improve the well-being of their animals by encouraging natural behaviours and positive affect. Unfortunately, animals can not self-report, therefore we need other ways to assess if these enrichments (extra bedding, brush access, companionship of other animals) are accomplishing what we intend them to. The focus of this study will therefore be identifying positive affective states in dairy cattle by varying the enrichments offered to animals and subsequently monitoring their physiology and behaviour for indicators of affect. We expect the animals with access to enrichments to be in a more positive affective state. If we don't see these results, we may not know how to make dairy cows happy or how to measure their happiness effectively. 

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Not only will this research help us understand how to better assess the emotional state of dairy animals to improve their lives, it can give the dairy industry specific measures they can use to prove to consumers that animals are living a "life worth living", not just avoiding negative states but providing positive experiences to animals as well. ​​

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