Human-Animal Interactions (Linnéa)

Five Domains vs Five Freedoms

• Five Freedoms

  • Focuses on preventing bad things, e.g. pain, hunger

• Five Domains

  • Focuses on the animal’s mental state

  • Adds positive things, e.g. joy, choice

Human handling of farm animals

• Most common form of human handling

  • also mostly studied due to the economic costs of decreased production

• Negative handling, despite brief and regular

  • increases fear of humans and stress

  • reduces

    • growth

    • feed conversion efficency

    • reproduction

    • health

How does the physical handling of animals affect them?

• Rough handling affects their health negatively

  • e.g. shouting, hitting, approaching too quickly, or moving in unpredictable ways

  • Farm animals handled roughly associates this handling with ALL humans (observed in pigs, chicks, cattle)

    • This learned fear can have marked effect on the production

    • e.g. milk production, gentle vs aversive handling

• Gentle handling — compared to rough handling in poultry:

  • Increases egg production

  • Reduces injury

  • Increases resistance to E. coli infection

  • Improves feed efficiency and growth

• Note that also NO physical contact (just the presence itself) can lead to negative health effects

  • Especially prey animals, who may see us as predators

Can animals distinguish between different human individuals?

• Pigs

  • Does not always distinguish between different handlers/strangers

  • Tend to generalize the behaviour of one handler onto all handlers

  • Early handling of pigs lower their stress for future general handling

  • Reacts differently to different people (uncertain if this is due to different behaviour or not)

• Chicks

  • Generalize their habituation to the original handler to a similarly dressed stranger

  • Imprinting behaviour proves that they can distinguish between “mother” and other people

  • Reacts differently to different people (uncertain if this is due to different behaviour or not)

• Cattle

  • Early handling of cattle lower their stress for future general handling

  • Reacts differently to different people (uncertain if this is due to different behaviour or not)

Imprinting

Precocial birds (chicken, ducks, geese…) are genetically programmed to bond with the first moving object they see between 12-36 hours after hatching

Human-Animal Interactions are affected by the following factors in humans:

• Attitude

• Knowledge and experience

  • some keepers with long-term experience may have a more aversive behaviour

• Personality

  • patient, independent, and non-sociable may correlate with cows’ willingness to enter milking machines and reduced restlessness during milking

• Anxiety levels

  • human fear triggers immediate defensive responses in horses, causing them to avoid human interaction

• Gender

Effect of attitude on animal handling

• Pigs

  • Proportion of negative interactions initiated

  • Time taken for sows to approach handler (measure of fear)

  • Total litter size (measure of reproductive success)

• Cattle

  • Positive attitude correlates with positive handling, correlates with lower stress in the cows

HUEC

Behaviour(s) animal ONLY performs in the presence of humans

Tonic immobility

When flipping a chicken upside down, they may stay frozen due to a fearful response

• The longer in tonic immobility, the more fearful it is considered to be

One health

The integrated health of humans and animals (and environmental health)

• E.g. less fearful pigs is better welfare for both the pig and the handlers

Potential solutions to reduce negative interactions

• Increased contact with humans

  • Particularly during rearing

    • Can markedly decrease the level of fearfulness of the animals

• Appropriate posture and behaviour during contact

  • e.g. talking quietly, avoiding sudden movements, touching the animal at first approach

  • Use species-specific behaviours.

    • For example, the best places to touch animals could be determined by examining where animals groom each other.

• Improvement in handling facilities

  • leading to easier flow of animals, would greatly reduce the amount of rough handling farm animals receive, and would likely result in tamer and less fearful animals.

  • A learned fear of people as a result of necessary aversive treatment can be reduced if the person doing the treatment wears special coloured clothes.

• Consistency and familiarity

  • If negative interactions were randomly incorporated into a routine of mostly positive interactions, the animals showed virtually the same elevated level of fear as animals that received only negative interactions. Such effects on animal welfare may be due to a reduction in an animal’s sense of predictability and control

    • a study of Captive cheetahs showed that the regularity of husbandry routines was positively correlated with reproductive success.

Zoonotic diseases/zoonoses

• Diseases shared among animals and humans

Reverse zoonosis

Transfer of pathogens from humans to animals