This study aimed to investigate how farrowing and rearing systems affect skin lesions, serum cortisol, and aggressive behavior as indicators for weaning stress of piglets. Between May 2016 and March 2018, in total 3144 weaning piglets from three different farrowing systems were examined: farrowing crates (FC), single-housing free-farrowing pens (FF), and group-housing of lactating sows and litters (GH). After weaning and regrouping, piglets were relocated to conventional rearing pens (conv; 5.7 m2) or to wean-to-finish pens (w-f; 12.4 m2). Skin lesions were scored 24 h after weaning. Blood samples were taken one week before and 24 h after weaning to analyze the individual difference in serum cortisol. Behavior was observed for 24 h after relocation. Animals raised in FC and FF had significantly more skin lesions than that of GH animals. Piglets born in GH showed lower cortisol differences and fought less and for shorter periods compared to FC and FF piglets. Piglets weaned to w-f pens showed greater cortisol changes and fought significantly longer than piglets in conv pens. Group housing during the suckling period reduced weaning stress for piglets in terms of skin lesions, serum cortisol, and aggressive behavior. Greater space allowance (w-f vs. conv) was not beneficial with regard to the investigated parameters.
This study aimed to investigate the effects of farrowing and rearing systems on tail lesions and losses of docked and undocked pigs. Pigs from three farrowing systems: Conventional farrowing crate (FC), free farrowing (FF) and group housing of lactating sows (GH) were randomly allocated to different rearing systems: A conventional system (CONV), where the pigs were regrouped and transferred to conventional finishing pens at ten weeks of age or a wean-to-finish (W-F) system, where the pigs remained in their pens until slaughter with higher space allowance during rearing. Weekly, tail lesions and losses were assessed individually. The incidence of tail lesions was higher in undocked CONV pigs compared to undocked W-F pigs (maximum: CONV 58.01%, W-F 41.16%). The rearing system had a significant effect on tail losses at the end of finishing (CONV 67.63%, W-F 38.2%). The significant effect of the rearing system might be explained by higher space allowance during rearing and reduced regrouping stress for W-F pigs. In conclusion, farrowing systems showed no effects, but the W-F rearing system reduces the frequency of tail lesions and losses; the curves of tail lesions increased slower and stayed on a lower level, which resulted in lower losses as well.
The identification of social interactions is of fundamental importance for animal behavioral studies, addressing numerous problems like investigating the influence of social hierarchical structures or the drivers of agonistic behavioral disorders. However, the majority of previous studies often rely on manual determination of the number and types of social encounters by direct observation which requires a large amount of personnel and economical efforts. To overcome this limitation and increase research efficiency and, thus, contribute to animal welfare in the long term, we propose in this study a framework for the automated identification of social contacts. In this framework, we apply a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect the location and orientation of pigs within a video and track their movement trajectories over a period of time using a Kalman filter (KF) algorithm. Based on the tracking information, we automatically identify social contacts in the form of head–head and head–tail contacts. Moreover, by using the individual animal IDs, we construct a network of social contacts as the final output. We evaluated the performance of our framework based on two distinct test sets for pig detection and tracking. Consequently, we achieved a Sensitivity, Precision, and F1-score of 94.2%, 95.4%, and 95.1%, respectively, and a MOTA score of 94.4%. The findings of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of our keypoint-based tracking-by-detection strategy and can be applied to enhance animal monitoring systems.
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