Abstract
Consideration of animal welfare is essential to address the consumers’ demands and for the long term sustainability of commercial poultry. However, assessing welfare in large poultry flocks, to be able to detect potential welfare risks and to control or minimize its impact is difficult. Current developments in technology and mathematical modelling open new possibilities for real-time automatic monitoring of animal welfare and health. New technological innovations potentially adaptable to commercial poultry are appearing, although their practical implementation is still being defined. In this paper, we review the latest technological developments with potential to be applied to poultry welfare, especially for broiler chickens and laying hens. Some of the examples that are presented and discussed include the following: sensors for farm environmental monitoring, movement, or physiological parameters; imaging technologies such as optical flow to detect gait problems and feather pecking; infrared technologies to evaluate birds’ thermoregulatory features and metabolism changes, that may be indicative of welfare, health and management problems. All these technologies have the potential to be implemented at the commercial level to improve birds’ welfare and to optimize flock management, therefore, improving the efficiency of the system in terms of use of resources and, thus, long term sustainability.
Highlights
Public concern regarding the conditions in which producing animals are maintained has led to the need for developing methods to verify minimum animal welfare standards
World Organization for Animal Health [1], “An animal is in a good state of welfare if it is healthy, comfortable, well nourished, safe, able to express innate behaviour, and if it is not suffering from unpleasant states such as pain, fear and distress”
Thermal stress together with fear induced by routine management practices were the main sources of stress considered by Lee et al [40], who tested their effects on vocalization patterns of laying hens
Summary
Public concern regarding the conditions in which producing animals are maintained has led to the need for developing methods to verify minimum animal welfare standards. In intensive poultry production a large number of factors, such as stocking density, environmental deterioration, unsuitable social environments, thermal stress, or difficulties in accessing essential resources can be major sources of stress that can lead to welfare deterioration and reduced performance [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Many of these factors can be controlled through well-established management practices to provide birds with an optimal environment. The practical applications and the potential impact of such technologies are discussed
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