Assessing Welfare: Short-Term Responses

Abstract

This chapter provides an account of the responses of animals to short-term disturbances. The measures of welfare that are used when an individual encounters problems over a timescale of minutes or hours are somewhat different from those used when problems last for days, weeks or years. People may experience and express delight or dismay at experiences lasting for only a few seconds or minutes and these may be important in life or relatively trivial. The situation is the same for other species. Animals respond to handling, transport or painful treatment and their responses can be measured. Some measures are of behaviour while many are of physiology. All are discussed in detail in this chapter. The concept of the magnitude of good or poor welfare, considering both intensity and duration of effect on the individual, is introduced. Keywords Short-term problems · Handling · Transport · Pain · Welfare · Stress Since welfare refers to the state of an animal, measurements of that state are used in the assessment of welfare. The wide range of ways in which animals attempt to cope with their environment results in there being many indicators of good or poor welfare. Many coping attempts involve, or are associated with, positive or negative feelings (Broom 1991a, b, 1998) so the indicators are often indicators of feelings. It could be that, to combat some problem, one particular coping method is mainly employed, so measurements of that method would provide most of the necessary information. In most studies of welfare, however, it is desirable that a range of measures be obtained. Measures or techniques that are currently proving to be of value in assessing welfare are reviewed in this and the following two chapters. At present, measurements of poor welfare are more common than those of good welfare, since poor welfare is associated with more obvious behavioural, physiological and pathological signs. Some methods of trying to cope with problems are used for both transient and long-lasting problems, but most methods are concerned principally with one or the other. Indications that an individual is failing to cope may not be evident when a problem is brief because they occur only when the problem is long-lasting; these are