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Measuring fearfulness of hens in commercial organic egg production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2023

L Hegelund  and
JT Sørensen
L Hegelund*
Affiliation:
Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences (DIAS), Department of Animal Health, Welfare and Nutrition, PO Box 50, DK-8830 Tjele, Denmark
JT Sørensen
Affiliation:
Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences (DIAS), Department of Animal Health, Welfare and Nutrition, PO Box 50, DK-8830 Tjele, Denmark
*
* Contact for correspondence and requests for reprints: lene.hegelund@agrsci.dk
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Abstract

To evaluate agreement between flock-based fear tests used in welfare assessments of laying hens in commercial organic farms, three tests were applied in 27 flocks of layers. Tests were performed at 35 and 55 weeks of age and were based on the concepts of ‘novel object’, ‘sudden sound’ and two different measures of ‘approaching human’. In general, agreements between tests were poor. The two measures based on ‘approaching human’ had the highest agreement, while the agreement between all other flock-based tests were lower. There was low agreement between testing at age 35 and 55 weeks.

In order to evaluate the degree to which the flock-based fear tests reflect individual hens' underlying fearfulness; tonic immobility (TI) tests were also applied on individual hens in eight flocks. There was large individual variation in the duration of tonic immobility, but also significant difference between flocks regarding mean duration of immobilisation. However there was no statistically significant association between TI-tests and flock-based tests. These results emphasise the need for careful consideration of choice of test stimuli for flock-based fear tests, and indicate that the investigated flock-based fear tests do not reflect the individual hens' underlying fearfulness.

Keywords

animal welfarefear testflock evaluationlaying henstest stimuliTonic Immobility Test
Type
Research Article
Information
Animal Welfare , Volume 16 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on the Assessment of Animal Welfare at Farm and Group Level , May 2007 , pp. 169 - 171
Copyright
© 2007 Universities Federation for Animal Welfare

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