Co-occurrence of sudden feeding behaviour deviations and welfare issue onsets in growing-finishing pigs.

Background: Modern sensor technologies and algorithms have the potential to continuously monitor indicators of individual animal welfare, but in growing-finishing pigs the validity of such welfare monitoring remains low for unclear reasons. This study explored how sudden deviations in individual pig feeding behaviour, detected as alerts by a dynamic linear model with Kalman filter, relate to the onset of welfare issues.

Results: Alerts frequencies varied across feeding behaviour components, with higher occurrences for feed intake, feeding duration, feeding rate and night intake (approximately 14.

Short-term associations between ambient ammonia concentrations and growing-finishing pig performance and health.

Using sensors, the health and welfare of growing-finishing pigs can be continuously monitored by detecting deviations from pigs' normal behaviour, but the validity of such algorithms requires improvement. As changes in the environment influence pig behaviour, monitoring temporal changes in environmental factors may help identify periods with a higher risk of welfare issues. The real-time relationships between pig welfare and many environmental factors are, however, not well-understood.

Housing and personality effects on judgement and attention biases in dairy cows.

Affective states can be inferred from responses to ambiguous and threatening stimuli, using Judgement Bias Tasks (JBTs) and Attention Bias Tasks (ABTs). We investigated the separate and interactive effects of personality and housing conditions on dairy cattle affective states. We assessed personality in 48 heifers using Open-Field, Novel-Object and Runway tests.