Positive Affective States in Pigs and Cattle: Assessment and Impact on Resilience

Affective states (i.e., emotions and moods) are a key aspect of animal welfare. Currently, there is an increasing interest in stimulating positive affective states in animals like pigs and cattle, by modifying their physiological and social environment, rather than only avoiding negative ones. Promoting positive experiences has a direct benefit for their welfare and may also potentially improve resilience, namely an animal’s ability to be minimally affected by or to swiftly overcome challenges. This could in turn improve animal health, and therefore production efficiency and sustainability. To improve resilience through the stimulation of positive affective states, we first have to be able to comprehensively assess these states. Several promising indicators of positive affective states have been proposed, including play behaviour, certain ear and tail postures, dynamics of salivary oxytocin, increased heart rate variability (HRV), and surface temperature of lateralized body parts. However, there are still many knowledge gaps regarding these indicators, which will be addressed in the proposed project. After developing reliable tools to assess positive affective states, the next step is to determine their putative link with different aspects of resilience, i.e., physiological, affective, and cognitive resilience, of which the latter has been scarcely studied. Therefore, this project has the following two objectives: 1) validate potential indicators of positive affective states in pigs and cattle (play behaviour, ear and tail postures, salivary oxytocin, HRV, surface temperature) and their mutual relationships; and 2) determine whether and how positive affective states influence all three aspects of resilience of these species to different challenges. In order to address these objectives, four complementary working packages (WPs) are planned. WP1 and WP2 will utilise data from previous experiments with pigs, aiming to address objective 1. WP3 and WP4 consist of new experiments in pigs and cattle respectively and are designed to target both objectives.