welfare evaluation
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Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Amy L. Miller ◽  
Johnny V. Roughan

Cancer-bearing mice are at risk of developing anxiety, pain, or malaise. These conditions may not only harm welfare but could also undermine data quality and translational validity in studies to develop therapeutic interventions. We aimed to establish whether, or at what point mice developing lung cancer show these symptoms, what measures can best detect their onset, and if data quality and animal welfare can be enhanced by using non-aversive handling (NAH). Welfare was monitored using various daily methods. At the beginning and end of the study, we also scored behaviour for general welfare evaluation, recorded nociceptive thresholds, and applied the mouse grimace scale (MGS). Cancer caused a decline in daily welfare parameters (body weight, and food and water consumption) beginning at around 4 days prior to euthanasia. As cancer progressed, rearing and walking declined to a greater extent in cancer-bearing versus control mice, while grooming, inactive periods, and MGS scores increased. A decline in nest building capability and food consumption provided a particularly effective means of detecting deteriorating welfare. These changes suggested a welfare problem arose as cancer developed, so similar studies would benefit from refinement, with mice being removed from the study at least 4 days earlier. However, the problem of highly varied tumour growth made it difficult to determine this time-point accurately. There were no detectable beneficial effects of NAH on either data quality or in terms of enhanced welfare.


Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 3095
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Maśko ◽  
Małgorzata Wierzbicka ◽  
Łukasz Zdrojkowski ◽  
Tomasz Jasiński ◽  
Bartosz Pawliński ◽  
...  

As the breeding of donkeys has increased due to different types of use, welfare evaluation importance increases. This equid’s welfare state has been described using body condition indicators and the geometric morphometrics method. However, the dorsal profile has not yet been assessed in donkeys. In this study, the body condition score (BCS), fatty neck score (FNS), dental condition score (DCS), sex, and breed were used as criteria of dorsal profile deformations. Photographs of 40 donkeys were analyzed using geometric morphometrics. Within the entire set of dorsal profiles, the variance of the first three principal components (PCs) was PC1 = 37.41%, PC2 = 23.43%, and PC3 = 13.34%. The dorsal profiles displayed deformation as an effect of FNS and BCS on size (FNS p = 0.012; BCS p = 0.024) and shape (FNS p < 0.0001; BCS p < 0.0001), rather than as an effect of DCS (p < 0.0001), sex (p = 0.0264), and breed (p < 0.0001) only on shape. The highest distances among the categories (Mahalanobis distances: MD ≥ 13.26; Procrustes distances: PD ≥ 0.044) were noted for FNS. The lowest distances were noted between jennets and males (MD = 4.58; PD = 0.012) and between BCS 1 and BCS 2 (MD = 4.70; PD = 0.018). Donkeys’ body condition affects their dorsal profile and both FNS and BCS measurements should be considered when a donkey’s dorsal profile is investigated.


Author(s):  
David Wolf ◽  
H. Allen Klaiber

The value of a differentiated product is simply the sum of its parts. This concept is easily observed in housing markets where the price of a home is determined by the underlying bundle of attributes that define it and by the price households are willing to pay for each attribute. These prices are referred to as implicit prices because their value is indirectly revealed through the price of another product (typically a home) and are of interest as they reveal the value of goods, such as nearby public amenities, that would otherwise remain unknown. This concept was first formalized into a tractable theoretical framework by Rosen, and is known as the hedonic pricing method. The two-stage hedonic method requires the researcher to map housing attributes into housing price using an equilibrium price function. Information recovered from the first stage is then used to recover inverse demand functions for nonmarket goods in the second stage, which are required for nonmarginal welfare evaluation. Researchers have rarely implemented the second stage, however, due to limited data availability, specification concerns, and the inability to correct for simultaneity bias between price and quality. As policies increasingly seek to deliver large, nonmarginal changes in public goods, the need to estimate the hedonic second stage is becoming more poignant. Greater effort therefore needs to be made to establish a set of best practices within the second stage, many of which can be developed using methods established in the extensive first-stage literature.


Author(s):  
David A. Comerford ◽  
Leonhard K. Lades

AbstractActions can provide “responsibility utility” when they signal the actors’ identities or values to others or to themselves. This paper considers a novel implication of this responsibility utility for welfare analysis: fully informed incentive-compatible choice data can give a biased measure of the utility delivered by exogenously determined outcomes. A person’s choice of a policy outcome may be informed by responsibility utility that would be strictly absent if that same person were a passive recipient of that same policy outcome. We introduce the term “desirance” to describe a rank ordering over exogenously determined outcomes and present evidence that desirance captures the welfare consequences of exogenously determined outcomes more accurately than preference. We review literatures showing that preference is sensitive to contextual variations that influence responsibility utility and show experimentally that responsibility utility can explain discrepancies between welfare estimates derived from choice data and subjective well-being data. We close by discussing subjective well-being as a potential measure of desirance.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Arcidiacono ◽  
Karthik Muralidharan ◽  
Eun-young Shim ◽  
John Singleton

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Brscic ◽  
Barbara Contiero ◽  
Luisa Magrin ◽  
Giorgia Riuzzi ◽  
Flaviana Gottardo

Background: The approach to farm animal welfare evaluation has changed and animal-based measures (ABM), defined as the responses of an animal or effects on an animal, were introduced to assess animal welfare. Animal-based measures can be taken directly on the animal or indirectly and include the use of animal records. They can result from a specific event or be the cumulative outcome of many days, weeks, or months. The objective of the current study was to analyze the use of general ABM codified terms in the scientific literature, the presence of their definitions, and the gap mapping of their use across animal species, categories, years of publication, and geographical areas of the corresponding author's institution. The ultimate aim was to propose a common standard terminology to improve communication among stakeholders. In this study, data models were populated by collecting information coming from scientific papers extracted through a transparent and reproducible protocol using Web of ScienceTM and filtering for the general ABM codified terms (or synonyms/equivalents). A total of 199 papers were retained, and their full texts were assessed. The frequency of general codified ABM terms was analyzed according to the classification factors listed in the objectives. These papers were prevalently European (159 documents), and the most represented species was cattle. Fifty percent of the papers did not provide a definition of the general ABM terms, and 54% cited other sources as reference for their definition. The results of the study showed a very low penetration of the general codified ABM term in the literature on farm animal welfare, with only 1.5% of the papers including the term ABM. This does not mean that specific ABM are not studied, but rather that these specific ABM are not defined as such under a common umbrella, and there is no consensus on the use of terminology, not even among scientists. Thus, we cannot expect the stakeholders to use a common language and a standardized terminology. The recognition and the inclusion of ABM in the lists of commonly accepted abbreviations of scientific journals could be a first step to harmonize the terminology in the scientific literature.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3251
Author(s):  
Shuqin Tu ◽  
Weijun Yuan ◽  
Yun Liang ◽  
Fan Wang ◽  
Hua Wan

Instance segmentation is an accurate and reliable method to segment adhesive pigs’ images, and is critical for providing health and welfare information on individual pigs, such as body condition score, live weight, and activity behaviors in group-housed pig environments. In this paper, a PigMS R-CNN framework based on mask scoring R-CNN (MS R-CNN) is explored to segment adhesive pig areas in group-pig images, to separate the identification and location of group-housed pigs. The PigMS R-CNN consists of three processes. First, a residual network of 101-layers, combined with the feature pyramid network (FPN), is used as a feature extraction network to obtain feature maps for input images. Then, according to these feature maps, the region candidate network generates the regions of interest (RoIs). Finally, for each RoI, we can obtain the location, classification, and segmentation results of detected pigs through the regression and category, and mask three branches from the PigMS R-CNN head network. To avoid target pigs being missed and error detections in overlapping or stuck areas of group-housed pigs, the PigMS R-CNN framework uses soft non-maximum suppression (soft-NMS) by replacing the traditional NMS to conduct post-processing selected operation of pigs. The MS R-CNN framework with traditional NMS obtains results with an F1 of 0.9228. By setting the soft-NMS threshold to 0.7 on PigMS R-CNN, detection of the target pigs achieves an F1 of 0.9374. The work explores a new instance segmentation method for adhesive group-housed pig images, which provides valuable exploration for vision-based, real-time automatic pig monitoring and welfare evaluation.


Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 854
Author(s):  
Federica Loi ◽  
Giovannantonio Pilo ◽  
Giulia Franzoni ◽  
Rossana Re ◽  
Francesca Fusi ◽  
...  

The need for animal welfare definition and assessment is increasing worldwide, and several studies have been conducted to help fill the knowledge gaps regarding the welfare of cattle. However, further studies are needed to provide valid synthetized measures for welfare evaluation. The aim of this study was to assess the welfare status of 16 Sardinian dairy cattle farms, based on the developed Animal Welfare and Biosecurity Evaluation checklist (AWB-EF) and the corresponding hematological, biochemical, and electrophoretic profiles of these animals. Considering the AWB-EF as gold standard, blood samples were collected from 230 Holstein breed dairy cattle, aged between 3 and 8 years, out of the periparturient period, and with no clinical signs of specific pathologies. Principal Component (PC) and correlation analyses were performed to simplify phenomena interpretation and assess positive/negative associations. Four PCs were able to explain 76% of the total variability, and six laboratory parameters were strongly associated with the AWB-EF score (Spearman’s correlation coefficient ≥0.40, p-Value < 0.05), reflecting the real health status of the animals. Given the complexity of animal welfare as a multidimensional concept and the need to include both animal-based and non-based measures in welfare evaluation, the present work represents a sound basis for future evaluation and veterinary health planning.


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