Rat and mouse control methods potentially affect the welfare of many millions of animals every year. Here, the humaneness of the methods used in the UK and the USA is assessed in terms of their speed and mode of action, the appearance and behaviour of affected animals, experiences of human victims, long-term effects on animals that survive exposure, and welfare risks to non-target animals. Several methods emerge as relatively humane: cyanide, alpha-chloralose, electrocution traps and well-designed snap traps all usually kill swiftly and with little distress. Preventative methods such as rodent-proofing are also humane, as well as an essential — and probably under-used — component of effective control. However, anticoagulant poisons, the most common means of controlling rodents, generally take several days to kill, during which time they cause distress, disability and/or pain. Sub-lethally affected animals are also likely to experience haemorrhages and their sequelae, and carnivores feeding on affected rodents may be secondarily poisoned. The acute rodenticides zinc phosphide and calciferol are also generally inhumane, the former typically causing severe pain for several hours, and the latter, pain and illness for several days. Sticky boards, to which rodents become adhered by the feet and fur until they are killed or simply eventually die, also raise very serious welfare concerns. This evidence highlights remarkable paradoxes in the way society treats different classes of animal, and argues for more education, legislation and research targeted at reducing the vast numbers of rodents currently killed inhumanely.

Twelve Isa Brown hens (Gallus gallus domesticus) were trained to open a locked door for access to a pen containing an enclosed nest box (‘nest test’) and to return to a home pen containing food, water, litter and a perch (‘home test’). The door was connected to a computer-controlled load cell, which recorded work exerted on the door and unlocked the door when the hen had exceeded a predetermined workload. Following training, the workload was set at 10 Ns, and hens received one nest test per day at 80, 60, 40 or 20 min prior to oviposition, and then one home test per day after 1, 2, 3 or 4 h confinement in the nest pen. As oviposition approached, hens showed a higher work-rate for access to the nest pen, showed a shorter latency to use the nest box and spent a greater proportion of their visit time in the nest box. Hens also worked harder for the home pen, showed a lower latency to feed and spent more time feeding after their return as period of confinement increased. The hens’ work-rate for the nest pen at 40 min prior to oviposition was comparable with their work-rate for the home pen after 4 h confinement, while their work-rate was at its highest in nest tests at 20 min prior to oviposition. The technique appears to be a valid means of assessing the importance of environmental resources, the values of which vary with time. The results suggest that hens place a higher value on gaining access to a discrete nest-site prior to oviposition than they do on gaining access to food following 4 h food deprivation.

Various tools have been developed over previous years to study the welfare of laboratory animals. These include preference tests, which are commonly used to evaluate housing environments. Preference tests, however, have some pitfalls: they supply information only on the animals’ present preferences, and they allow the animal the choice only between the options offered. Other methods based upon the collection of clinico-chemical data require handling of the animals, which can be stressful in itself. An alternative may be to use telemetry to measure the changes in physiological parameters caused by different environmental conditions. The aim of this study was to use telemetry to evaluate the short-term impact of housing conditions on rodents. We monitored heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature in rats kept on three different types of flooring — bedding, grid floors and plastic floors. The study revealed significant differences in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature between rats housed in the three conditions, indicating that both grid floors and plastic floors are more stressful for the animals than bedding. The observed differences did not diminish over the two-week observation period. The grid-floor housing induced elevations in blood pressure and heart rate. Blood pressure remained elevated even when the animals were returned to standard bedding, whereas the heart rate declined back to its original value immediately in response to this shift. This study shows that telemetry is a very effective tool but that it needs integrating with other methods: in addition, a greater understanding of the biological significance of the changes in cardiovascular parameters is required before the hypothesis that these changes represent an indication of distress can be accepted.

Catching of broilers is the first stage in the transfer of birds to the slaughterhouse. The catching process entails a high risk not only of stress but also of injury and death to the birds. Associated injury and mortality rates have important implications not only for animal welfare but also for the economics of the procedure. Catching machines are advantageous with regard to labour costs and standards, and they may also reduce damage to the birds. In the present investigation the use of a sweeper-type catching machine was compared with manual catching under commercial conditions, data being collected during 43 mechanical and 40 manual catching events evenly distributed over one year. Dead-on-arrival rates were recorded, and 108 068 mechanically caught and 87 916 manually caught birds were examined for injuries on the shackles at the processing plant. Injury rates of all types were significantly reduced after mechanical catching. This improvement was highest with respect to leg injuries. There was no significant difference in the number of dead-on-arrivals except during the spring period, when there were higher losses of birds caught mechanically; this was thought to be attributable to climatic conditions. The loading of the transport containers with equal numbers of birds and the initial familiarisation period of the catching team with the machine are potentially problematic factors with potential for improvement. The catching machine investigated here, with its lower risk of injury to broilers than commercial manual catching, has the potential to limit impairment of bird welfare during catching.

Assessment of mass-produced animal-housing equipment can serve as a basis for improving animal welfare. A number of European countries have adopted various legal approaches to such assessment. In Germany, welfare assessment of housing equipment is voluntary, but minimum standards can be set by regulation for the assessment procedure and for the qualifications of the persons involved. From a scientific perspective, the time and resource constraints pose some problems, particularly as they apply to a voluntary procedure. For reasons of practicability, certain compromises will be required. Nevertheless, it is important to ensure that each assessment procedure is based upon scientific principles and considers animal welfare aspects to a sufficient extent. A proposal for the minimum standards of an assessment procedure has been elaborated by the Animal Welfare Committee of the German Agricultural Society (Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft, DLG), a shortened version of which is presented here. The animal welfare impact of such a regulated but voluntary procedure will be less than that of an obligatory assessment; however, the relatively flexible approach may still significantly contribute to the improvement of welfare aspects of livestock housing.

Behavioural management in zoos is often practiced within the confines of environmental enrichment, a well-known method which attempts to increase the welfare of captive animals. For the successful conservation and reintroduction of threatened or endangered species, however, it is also important to manage behaviour in such a way as to maintain behavioural diversity. The development of natural behaviour management (NBM) programs is advocated in this paper. These programs will act to maintain behavioural diversity in captivity and will encourage behaviour to be displayed in appropriate contexts through exposure of captive animals to naturalistic stimuli. The importance of developing appropriate antipredator and predation behaviours will be discussed in order to demonstrate how NBM strategies differ from, and can even conflict with, environmental enrichment strategies undertaken for welfare reasons.

Characterisation of the effect of transport on the welfare of fowl requires common currency methods that can compare the effects of diverse stressors using the same unit of measure. Aversion of broiler chickens (42 ± 1 days old) to vibrational and thermal stressors was investigated in a continuous free-choice procedure. Each choice-chamber had four compartments, connected via a central zone, offering a thermal stressor (T: 40°C, relative humidity 21%), a vibrational stressor (V: 2 Hz, 1 ms−2), concurrent vibrational and thermal stressors (VT), or no applied stressors (N). In experiment 1, there were no significant effects of stressor on the latency to leave the compartments after initial introduction (n = 24). In experiment 2, 12 subjects were introduced individually to a chamber for 4 h during each of a control and two treatment sessions. The results indicated that chickens did not avoid vibration, but significantly avoided the thermal stressor overall (T and VT; P < 0.001). As no interactive effect of the stressors was observed, all avoidance of the combined stressors can be attributed to the effects of the thermal stressor alone. Further work is required to establish ways in which delayed stressors can be studied using behavioural methods before common currency methods can be practicable.

Outdoor sows with nose rings can perform most of their natural behavioural activities except rooting. The prevention of rooting through surgical intervention (nose ringing) may be detrimental to welfare, although the behavioural and welfare consequences of rooting deprivation are not well documented. The present experiment examines exploratory behaviour in unringed, ringed and deringed gilts by repeatedly exposing the gilts to a sandbox supplied with bark chips. Four months prior to the experiment, 16 gilts, eight with nose rings and eight without, were housed in four fields. Over a period of 12 days, the 16 gilts, in pairs from the same field, were walked to the sandbox; each gilt visited the sandbox six times in total. After deringing of the ringed gilts (and a control procedure for the unringed gilts), all of the gilts were exposed to the sandbox twice. During each visit, the exploratory behavioural patterns of rooting, sniffing, manipulating, and chewing were observed using 30 s scan sampling. The ringed gilts showed no rooting behaviour in the sandbox; on the other hand, their mean frequency of chewing behaviour was significantly higher than that of the unringed gilts (19.89 versus 13.54; P < 0.05). When all of the exploratory behavioural patterns were summed, no significant differences were found between ringed and unringed gilts. On the second day after deringing, the previously ringed gilts started to root, and no significant difference in the incidence of rooting behaviour between unringed gilts and newly deringed gilts was found. We discuss whether rooting behaviour can be substituted by chewing in order to explore an environment. Gilts that are prevented from rooting are found to explore as much as rooting gilts, and they achieved an adequate knowledge of the sandbox (as demonstrated by the fact that they did not show increased exploration after deringing), although rooting was the preferred exploratory behaviour. In this study, we did not find serious symptoms of chronically reduced welfare as a result of nose ringing.

A questionnaire survey of farm experience, undertaken during lambing time in the year 2000 by 95 second-year veterinary undergraduate students, highlighted numerous areas of concern. On those farms attended, more than one third of shepherds (32; 34%) neither washed their hands in an approved scrub nor used arm-length disposable plastic gloves before attempted correction of a lambing problem. Sheep received a prophylactic antibiotic injection after an assisted lambing on just 33 farms (35%), while the majority of farmers (62 farms; 65%) treated only those ewes that became sick some days after assisted lambing. Veterinary assistance was requested to only 22 of 359 (6.1%) dystocia cases from a sample population of 79 610 lowground ewes. When lambs could not be delivered by farm staff the ewes were either humanely destroyed (65) or injected with antibiotics but subsequently died because of ensuing toxaemia from the emphysematous lambs in utero (272).