ETHOLOGICAL RESEARCH APPLIED TO FARM ANIMALS: RECONCILING ANIMAL WELFARE AND PRODUCTION

This paper illustrates the integrative feature of ethology with two complementary approaches in farm animals, one aiming at production targets and the other addressing concerns about animal welfare. The first approach is based on social ethology. As farm animals belong to gregarious species, their individual behaviour is strongly shaped by the group. Social organisation is based on both stable dominance relationships that ensure the resolution of many conflicts inherent to promiscuity among animals, and affinity relationships that ensure group cohesion and increase social tolerance in conflict situations. A better understanding of the behavioural mechanisms involved in the construction of social relationships, allows to providing animal husbandry practices that take into account the social needs of animals, highlights the importance of affinity relationships to alleviate problems due to social stress and ensures social support for a better adaptation. The second approach relies on cognitive ethology. While it is now widely accepted that animals are sentient beings capable of feeling emotions, understanding their emotional experience remains a tricky issue. The analysis of the emotion - cognition relationships allows to assess emotional experiences in animals through a scientific approach and to open new perspectives for a better understanding animal welfare. Inspired by theories in cognitive psychology, we have developed a framework to facilitate the study of emotions in animals from their cognitive abilities. Emotion depends on how the animal evaluates the eliciting situation based on a limited numbers of checks: the relevance of the situation (i.e. suddenness, familiarity, predictability and pleasantness), the implications of the situation for the animal, including how far the situation is consistent with its own expectations, and the coping potential of the animal, including the control offered by the situation and its ability to react. The outcomes of this limited number of evaluative checks determine the negative or positive nature of the emotion. Furthermore, recent works have shown that an emotion transiently influences the way the animal evaluates its situation and that the accumulation of emotions can long-lasting influence the evaluation processes. Innovative husbandry practices may then be recommended to seek positive experiences of animals and so genuinely improve their level welfare.