Recent Applications of Infrared Thermography for Animal Welfare and Veterinary Research: Everything from Chicks to Elephants

Eye temperature, measured using infrared thermography (IRT), is a non-invasive tool for evaluating the stress response in cattle, bison and elk to surgical procedures. Infrared thermography has recently revealed that a rapid drop in eye temperature is likely a sympathetically mediated response via vasoconstriction that can be used to detect fear and/or pain related responses in animals to different handling procedures. Infrared thermography may be used in the future as an objective outcome based measure for the evaluation and assessment of animal welfare. Assessing the feather cover of laying hens by IRT, for example, has proven to be a fast, objective and accurate method that more precisely reflects either actual feather cover or areas of bare skin. Infrared thermography has historically been used primarily as a veterinary diagnostic tool in horses and can be expanded for use in other species as varied as elephants. In addition, IRT methodologies have been employed to detect medical conditions as diverse as naval infections in newborn chicks and mastitis in dairy cattle. Recent data has demonstrated that IRT scans of the orbital area in calves allows for the efficacious identification of animals at earlier stages of illness, often several days to over one week before clinical signs were manifest. In concurrent research, individual animal identification using radio frequency identification tags (RFID) and an IRT camera located at a water station have been employed in a remote monitoring system to automatically collect thermal data for the early detection of disease in feedlot cattle.