Resilience in farm animals: biology, management, breeding and implications for animal welfare

Abstract

Abstract.A capacity for the animal to recover quickly from the impact of physical and social stressors and disease challenges is likely to improve evolutionary fitness of wild species and welfare and performance of farm animals. Salience and valence of stimuli sensed through neurosensors, chemosensors and immunosensors are perceived and integrated centrally to generate emotions and engage physiological, behavioural, immune, cognitive and morphological responses that defend against noxious challenges. These responses can be refined through experience to provide anticipatory and learned reactions at lower cost than innate less-specific reactions. Influences of behaviour type, coping style, and affective state and the relationships between immune responsiveness, disease resistance and resilience are reviewed. We define resilience as the capacity of animals to cope with short-term perturbations in their environment and return rapidly to their pre-challenge status. It is manifested in response to episodic, sporadic or situation-specific attributes of the environment and can be optimised via facultative learning by the individual. It is a comparative measure of differences between individuals in the outcomes that follow exposure to potentially adverse situations. In contrast, robustness is the capacity to maintain productivity in a wide range of environments without compromising reproduction, health and wellbeing. Robustness is manifested in response to persistent or cyclical attributes of the environment and is effected via activity of innate regulatory pathways. We suggest that for farm animals, husbandry practices that incorporate physical and social stressors and interactions with humans such as weaning, change of housing, and introduction to the milking parlour can be used to characterise resilience phenotypes. In these settings, resilience is likely to be more readily identified through the rate of return of variables to pre-challenge or normal status rather than through measuring the activity of diverse stress response and adaptation mechanisms. Our strategy for phenotyping resilience of sheep and cattle during weaning is described. Opportunities are examined to increase resilience through genetic selection and through improved management practices that provide emotional and cognitive enrichment and stress inoculation.Additional keywords: affective state, allostasis, animal behaviour, animal temperament, animal welfare, disease resistance, genetic selection, homeostasis, resilience, robustness, stress inoculation.

Associations between immune competence, stress responsiveness, and production in Holstein-Friesian and Holstein-Friesian × Jersey heifers reared in a pasture-based production system in Australia

“…The findings of our study also revealed that animals with both below average cellular and antibody immune responses had significantly higher serum cortisol concentrations compared with their average and above-average immune competence counterparts. Links between immune competence, behavioral coping styles, and stress responsiveness have been reported previously in livestock (Colditz and Hine, 2016). Allocation of resources toward biological processes such as coping mechanisms versus production is highly relevant to this area of research and has been reviewed elsewhere (Colditz, 2002).…”

“…Immune competence testing, as described here, combines measures of both antibody and cellular immune responses in an effort to predict the overall immune capacity of each individual animal. Cellular and antibody responses are most effective at controlling intra-and extracellular pathogens, respectively, and work in coordination to protect the host (Colditz and Hine, 2016). The magnitude of antibody and cell-mediated immune responses in dairy cattle have been shown to be negatively genetically correlated (Thompson-Crispi et al, 2012b).…”

Invited review: Piglet survival: benefits of the immunocompetence

“…The basic relationships of the immune system, robustness and resilience, survival and vitality of piglets were recently studied as well as reviewed in a comprehensive manner (e.g. Edwards and Baxter, 2015;Colditz and Hine, 2016). Until now, a common consideration of these three complexes has not been performed.…”

“…Resistance, however, is characterized by the ability of an individual to reduce the probability of infection or growth of the pathogen by limiting the pathogen burden within itself (Hermesch, 2014). Based on the definition by Knap (2005), robustness was defined by Colditz and Hine (2016), as the consistency of the phenotype of an animal independent of the persistent characteristics of the environment it is kept in. Resilience, however, was defined as the 'capacity of the animal to return rapidly to its prechallenge state following short-term exposure to a challenging situation' (Colditz and Hine, 2016).…”

Introductory Chapter: Applications of Stress Endocrinology in Wildlife Conservation and Livestock Science

“…Animals such as elephants, dolphins, birds and dogs can display complex cognitive ability guided by processes such as perception, learning, memory and decisionmaking [9,10]. Emotion in animals involves complex physiological, behavioural, immune, cognitive and morphological responses that enable them to generate behaviours to cope against stressors [11]. There are specific physiological markers of pain and stress that enable researchers to evaluate the welfare of animals from a quantitative viewpoint and relate the data to understand how the animal perceives its environment [12,13].…”