Hen emotional needs comprehensive assessment and resilience enhancement 1

Project summary

Animal welfare includes the long-term emotional states of the animals. Negative mood states, akin to depression in humans, are to be avoided, while positive mood states should be encouraged. This project brings together a consortium of experts in avian neuroscience, genetics, and automated behaviour analysis to identify predictors and behavioural indicators of long-term emotional states in laying hens. Using a recently developed neural marker of long-term emotional states, we will test the hypothesis that hens that recover more quickly from psychologically stressful events are less prone to developing negative moods. To evaluate behavioural recovery from stressful events (invasive catching and handling procedures), we will analyse the return to pre-stress routines using high-throughput data from a unique, ongoing project tracking each individual bird’s locations simultaneously in 4500 genotyped crossbred hens of known pedigree.

We will also evaluate the sympathetic and glucocorticoid hormone stress responses to short-term restraint stress. We will map the genetic architecture of the different aspects of the stress response and its recovery and relate them to the neural marker of long-term emotional states and to the genetics of other important health and production traits. Using location tracking, we will also identify which hens have strong social ties and which do not, to relate social connectedness to stress responses and recovery. Finally, we will use automated video analysis, combined with location tracking, to identify behaviours that can be used as indicators of stress recovery and/or long-term emotional states. The resulting automated procedure can be used for welfare monitoring in commercial environments, and, together with the genetic architecture of long-term emotional states, to incorporate stress recovery and proneness for positive emotional states into future breeding programmes.