The farmer and the animal: a double mirror X. Boivin*, B. J. Lensink and I. Veissier 5 Qualitative welfare assessment: reading the behavioural expressions of pigs F. Wemelsfelder 14 The effect of the operational environment and operating protocols on the attitudes and behaviour of employed stockpersons M. F. Seabrook 21 Daily practice and dialogue-aspects of stockmanship and inter-human relatio...

Human welfare is strictly linked to the Earth’s natural resources, which are heavily exploited, thus making food production systems unsustainable [...]

Animal health and welfare planning is considered an important tool for herd management; however, its effectiveness is less well known. The aim of this study was to conduct animal health and welfare planning on 34 Austrian dairy farms and to evaluate changes in health and welfare after 1 yr. After an initial assessment using the Welfare Quality protocol (Welfare Quality Consortium, Lelystad, the...

Clearing tropical vegetation impacts biodiversity, the provision of ecosystem services, and thus ultimately human welfare. We quantified changes in land cover from 2000 to 2015 across the Cerrado biome of northern Minas Gerais state, Brazil. We assessed the potential biophysical and socio-economic drivers of the loss of Cerrado, natural regeneration and net cover change at the municipality leve...

The paper will argue that the ascendancy of human rights discourse, in both its global and domestic political contexts, has ambiguous consequences for the development of social policy. Recent instances of that ascendancy may be found on the one hand in the UNDP's 'World Development Report 2000', and on the other in the 'Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union', proclaimed in Decembe...

It may become advantageous to keep human-managed animals in the social network groups to which they have adapted. Data concerning the social networks of farm animal species and their ancestors are scarce but essential to establishing the importance of a natural social network for farmed animal species. Social Network Analysis (SNA) facilitates the characterization of social networking at group,...

Previous research on humans and animals suggests that the analysis of sleep patterns may reliably inform us about welfare status, but little research of this kind has been carried out for non-human animals in an applied context. This study explored the use of sleep and resting behaviour as indicators of welfare by describing the activity patterns of dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) housed in rescu...

In recent years there has been an increased interest in studies related to the welfare of avian species commonly kept as companion animals, specifically those in the order Psittaciformes, commonly referred to as ‘parrots’. During this time the biology and behaviour of wild parrots has also become better understood, aiding the assessment of welfare in captive environments. The impact of the pet ...

Anxious and depressed humans typically view circumstances more pessimistically than non-depressed individuals. Here, we explore the proposal that such cognitive biases also exist in non-human animals, and could be used as novel measures of animal welfare. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that wild-caught captive European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) are more optimistic in their interpretati...