Farmers’ representations of the effects of precision livestock farming on human-animal relationships

Kling‐Eveillard, Florence; Allain, Clément; Boivin, Xavier; Courboulay, Valérie; Creach, Pauline; Philibert, Aurore; Ramonet, Yannick; Hostiou, Nathalie

doi:10.1016/j.livsci.2020.104057

Cited by 29 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(27 reference statements)

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“…Indeed, Tallet et al (2019) showed that piglets which were tail docked with a cautery iron interacted with unfamiliar humans later than piglets that were not tail docked, and Lürzel et al (2015) observed that calves avoidance distances were higher after disbudding. In their study, Kling-Eveillard et al (2020) found that following the implementation of PLF, some farmers perceived the HAR as having improved, while others believed it deteriorated. They also mentioned concerns that having to manage an increased amount of data may reduce the time farmers spend with animals and impact farmers' observational skills.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Potential of Precision Livestock Farming Technologies to Help Address Farm Animal Welfare

2021

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The rise in the demand for animal products due to demographic and dietary changes has exacerbated difficulties in addressing societal concerns related to the environment, human health, and animal welfare. As a response to this challenge, Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) technologies are being developed to monitor animal health and welfare parameters in a continuous and automated way, offering the opportunity to improve productivity and detect health issues at an early stage. However, ethical concerns have been raised regarding their potential to facilitate the management of production systems that are potentially harmful to animal welfare, or to impact the human-animal relationship and farmers' duty of care. Using the Five Domains Model (FDM) as a framework, the aim is to explore the potential of PLF to help address animal welfare and to discuss potential welfare benefits and risks of using such technology. A variety of technologies are identified and classified according to their type [sensors, bolus, image or sound based, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)], their development stage, the species they apply to, and their potential impact on welfare. While PLF technologies have promising potential to reduce the occurrence of diseases and injuries in livestock farming systems, their current ability to help promote positive welfare states remains limited, as technologies with such potential generally remain at earlier development stages. This is likely due to the lack of evidence related to the validity of positive welfare indicators as well as challenges in technology adoption and development. Finally, the extent to which welfare can be improved will also strongly depend on whether management practices will be adapted to minimize negative consequences and maximize benefits to welfare.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Potential of Precision Livestock Farming Technologies to Help Address Farm Animal Welfare

2021

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“…Precision livestock farming lifts off a large amount of repetitive tasks off the farmer (Kling-Eveillard et al, 2020), but brings up new challenges and the need for specialist knowledge, skills and advisory support in order to control and interpret the machineries (Schillings, Bennett and Rose, 2021). PLF might also reduce the farmer's autonomy as they are getting more and more dependent on technological devices, drastically shifting what the job involves and changing farmer identity (Klerkx, Jakku and Labarthe, 2019;Kling-Eveillard et al, 2020;Pol et al, 2021). It has therefore been highlighted by the farmers that the decision making process should still be done by the farmer itself and PLF should only function as a useful guiding tool (Hartung et al, 2017).…”

Section: Implications Of Precision Livestock Farming For the Farmersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethics of Digital Animal Farming

Neethirajan¹

2021

Preprint

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The demand for animal products is expected to continue to rise, which requires the development of efficient livestock farming systems. Environmental, societal and economic concerns regarding this industry are however accumulating, addressing the large resource demand, pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions and health concerns that the livestock industry is responsible for. Precision livestock farming systems allow the continuous automatic monitoring of various physiological, behavioural and phenotypic parameters of animals in order to increase productivity and animal welfare while controlling and minimizing the environmental impact. There is a high potential for digital farming to be the solution for responsibly and ethically feeding the growing and urbanizing population. However, many problems and concerns are still present in this developing industry and remain relatively unaddressed, starting with the ethical aspects in regard to the animal, including its objectification, human-animal relationships and welfare and ending with the societal implications of this digitalization. Concrete frameworks, inter-disciplinary studies and global legislation need to be put in place in order to ensure the safety and protection of the animals, farmer and society. Here, implications of digital farming for the animals, farmers, society and the planet are critically reviewed with the future outlook of digital farms.

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“…A shift to relying on automation for monitoring animals as well as for performing physically demanding and repetitive work related to caregiving could lead to a radical paradigm shift in livestock sector priorities, drifting away human-animal interactions as a dominant feature at the core of farming. Using fully-automated technology to complete more husbandry tasks on livestock and poultry farms will change the nature of work on farms and could have impacts on how and how often farmers interact with their animals (Hartung et al, 2017;Kling-Eveillard et al, 2020). Research will be needed to more completely understand the questions that will arise in response to such changes in human-animal interactions, including:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Integration of Social and Ethical Awareness in Precision Livestock Farming Research

2021

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While fully automated livestock production may be considered the ultimate goal for optimising productivity at the farm level, the benefits and costs of such a development at the scale at which it needs to be implemented must also be considered from social and ethical perspectives. Automation resulting from Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) could alter fundamental views of human-animal interactions on farm and, even further, potentially compromise human and animal welfare and health if PLF development does not include a flexible, holistic strategy for integration. To investigate topic segregation, inclusion of socio-ethical aspects, and consideration of human-animal interactions within the PLF research field, the abstracts from 644 peer-reviewed publications were analysed using the recent advances in the Natural Language Processing (NLP). Two Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) probabilistic models with varying number of topics (13 and 3 for Model 1 and Model 2, respectively) were implemented to create a generalised research topic overview. The visual representation of topics produced by LDA Model 1 and Model 2 revealed prominent similarities in the terms contributing to each topic, with only weight for each term being different. The majority of terms for both models were process-oriented, obscuring the inclusion of social and ethical angles in PLF publications. A subset of articles (5%, n = 32) was randomly selected for manual examination of the full text to evaluate whether abstract text and focus reflected that of the article as a whole. Few of these articles (12.5%, n = 4) focused specifically on broader ethical or societal considerations of PLF or (9.4%, n = 3) discussed PLF with respect to human-animal interactions. While there was consideration of the impact of PLF on animal welfare and farmers in nearly half of the full texts examined (46.9%, n = 15), this was often limited to a few statements in passing. Further, these statements were typically general rather than specific and presented PLF as beneficial to human users and animal recipients. To develop PLF that is in keeping with the ethical values and societal concerns of the public and consumers, projects, and publications that deliberately combine social context with technological processes and results are needed.

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Farmers’ representations of the effects of precision livestock farming on human-animal relationships

Cited by 29 publications

References 23 publications

Exploring the Potential of Precision Livestock Farming Technologies to Help Address Farm Animal Welfare

Exploring the Potential of Precision Livestock Farming Technologies to Help Address Farm Animal Welfare

Ethics of Digital Animal Farming

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Integration of Social and Ethical Awareness in Precision Livestock Farming Research

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