Sociality and Wild Animal Welfare: Future Directions

387

397

Throughout its 25-year history, the Five Domains Model for animal welfare assessment has been regularly updated to include at each stage the latest authenticated developments in animal welfare science thinking. The domains of the most up-to-date Model described here are: 1 Nutrition, 2 Physical Environment, 3 Health, 4 Behavioural Interactions and 5 Mental State. The first four domains focus attention on factors that give rise to specific negative or positive subjective experiences (affects), which contribute to the animal’s mental state, as evaluated in Domain 5. More specifically, the first three domains focus mainly on factors that disturb or disrupt particular features of the body’s internal stability. Each disturbed or disrupted feature generates sensory inputs which are processed by the brain to form specific negative affects, and these affects are associated with behaviours that act to restore the body’s internal stability. As each such behaviour is essential for the survival of the animal, the affects associated with them are collectively referred to as “survival-critical affects”. In contrast, Domain 4, now named Behavioural Interactions, focusses on evidence of animals consciously seeking specific goals when interacting behaviourally with (1) the environment, (2) other non-human animals and (3) as a new feature of the Model outlined here, humans. The associated affects, evaluated via Domain 5, are mainly generated by brain processing of sensory inputs elicited by external stimuli. The success of the animals’ behavioural attempts to achieve their chosen goals is reflected in whether the associated affects are negative or positive. Collectively referred to as “situation-related affects”, these outcomes are understood to contribute to animals’ perceptions of their external circumstances. These observations reveal a key distinction between the way survival-critical and situation-related affects influence animals’ aligned behaviours. The former mainly reflect compelling motivations to engage in genetically embedded behavioural responses, whereas the latter mainly involve conscious behavioural choices which are the hallmarks of agency. Finally, numerous examples of human–animal interactions and their attendant affects are described, and the qualitative grading of interactions that generate negative or positive affect is also illustrated.

Section: The 25-year History Of the Five Domains Model: Responses mentioning

confidence: 99%

The 2020 Five Domains Model: Including Human–Animal Interactions in Assessments of Animal Welfare

Mellor

Beausoleil

Littlewood

et al. 2020

387

397

“…Furthermore, SNA has provided a more accurate prediction of the long-term aggression within group compared to dyadic trait methods [ 11 ]. Nevertheless, a deep understanding of SNA and its applications in pig behaviour requires further investigation [ 12 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Network Analysis of Agonistic Behaviour and Its Association with Economically Important Traits in Pigs

Agha

Fàbrega

Quintanilla

et al. 2020

Aggression behaviour has several negative consequences on the performance and welfare of pigs. Here, the Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach was employed to (1) identify individual traits that describe the role of each animal in the aggression; (2) investigate the association of these traits with performance and feeding behaviour traits. The study was conducted on 326 Duroc pigs reared in 29 pens. Several individual centrality traits were identified and used to calculate the Social Rank Index. The Dominant, Subordinate, and Isolated animals represented 21.1%, 57.5% and 21.4%, respectively. No significant correlations were observed between out-degree (number of initiated agonistic behaviours) and growth traits, indicating the similarity of growth patterns for dominant and non-dominant animals. Furthermore, out-degree was correlated positively with average daily occupation time (time at the feeder/day) and average daily feeding frequency (number of visits to the feeder/day) but negatively with average daily feeding rate (gr/min). This may indicate the ability of non-dominant pigs to modify their behaviour to obtain their requirements. The Hamming distances between networks showed that there is no common behaviour pattern between pens. In conclusion, SNA showed the potential for extracting behaviour traits that could be used to improve pig performance and welfare.

“…The ability of higher order animals such as vertebrates to communicate or otherwise interact within their own species and with other species, which sometimes includes human beings, is an indication of their sentience. Communication involving transfers of information between senders and receivers requires engagement of their externally directed sense organs, for example, for touch, temperature, taste, smell, hearing and/or sight, and interpretation of the associated signals [54,77,78]. Communication may be intra-specific or inter-specific, active or passive, benign or threatening, routine or novel, and may have numerous purposes and/or consequences that often involve affective experiences for both senders and receivers [77].…”

Section: General Statements About Welfare-aligned Sentiencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, when little such knowledge is available, the confidence level assigned to these conclusions will be proportionately lower and the caution required when formulating them proportionately higher [68,111,112]. For example, detailed knowledge of the extent and character of affect-related behaviour in many wildlife species, including terrestrial and aquatic mammals and birds, is often very limited, as it is in reptiles, amphibians and fishes (e.g., [68,78,107,113,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,121,122,123]).…”

Section: General Statements About Welfare-aligned Sentiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Welfare-aligned Sentience: Enhanced Capacities to Experience, Interact, Anticipate, Choose and Survive

Mellor

2019

The focus of this opinion is on the key features of sentience in animals which can experience different states of welfare, encapsulated by the new term ‘welfare-aligned sentience’. This term is intended to exclude potential forms of sentience that do not enable animals in some taxa to have the subjective experiences which underlie different welfare states. As the scientific understanding of key features of sentience has increased markedly during the last 10 to 15 years, a major purpose here is to provide up-to-date information regarding those features. Eleven interconnected statements about sentience-associated body functions and behaviour are therefore presented and explained briefly. These statements are sequenced to provide progressively more information about key scientifically-supported attributes of welfare-aligned sentience, leading, in their entirety, to a more comprehensive understanding of those attributes. They are as follows: (1) Internal structure–function interactions and integration are the foundations of sentience; (2) animals posess a capacity to respond behaviourally to a range of sensory inputs; (3) the more sophisticated nervous systems can generate subjective experiences, that is, affects; (4) sentience means that animals perceive or experience different affects consciously; (5) within a species, the stage of neurobiological development is significant; (6) during development the onset of cortically-based consciousness is accompanied by cognitively-enhanced capacities to respond behaviourally to unpredictable postnatal environments; (7) sentience includes capacities to communicate with others and to interact with the environment; (8) sentience incorporates experiences of negative and positive affects; (9) negative and positive affective experiences ‘matter’ to animals for various reasons; (10) acknowledged obstacles inherent in anthropomorphism are largely circumvented by new scientific knowledge, but caution is still required; and (11) there is increasing evidence for sentience among a wider range of invertebrates. The science-based explanations of these statements provide the foundation for a brief definition of ‘welfare-aligned sentience’, which is offered for consideration. Finally, it is recommended that when assessing key features of sentience the same emphasis should be given to positive and negative affective experiences in the context of their roles in, or potential impacts on, animal welfare.