2021/02/24 by Pauline Créach, Créach, Pauline, Laura Warin +7
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Veterinary · #Livestock and Poultry Management #Animal Nutrition and Physiology #Animal Behavior and Welfare Studies
paper · doi:10.15454/ck2p-fp07
Ensuring consumers that animals are kept in a way that respects animal welfare is the basis of poultry farming, but civil society is calling for more transparency on farming practices. Animal welfare and health can be assessed using different methods and new technologies. They present an opportunity to carry out continuous and real-time measurements. The yOGA project aimed at validating the operation of an image analysis algorithm, Optical Flow, developed by the University of Oxford as a tool for monitoring welfare in broiler farms. It is based on the analysis of the movements of all the animals present in the field of observation. Data were collected from 21 broiler batches from 5 different farms: technical performances, records of health events and associated treatments, evaluations of welfare with the EBENE® method which was under development, scoring of footpad dermatitis, hockburns and gait scoring. It was planned to link the data collected on the farm to the results of Optical Flow but Oxford University was not able to extract the information from the video recordings. Therefore, the study focused on sensitivity analysis of the EBENE® measurements and their relationship to other more traditional data such as density, growth, gait scores, footpad dermatitis and hockburns. Analysis of the results showed the value of the EBENE® method with a medium to high sensitivity of the EBENE® criteria. Numerous correlations appeared between the EBENE® indicators and more traditional data. In particular, the expression of the natural behaviour of the species is linked to the density of animals and their health status. The lesions observed at the slaughterhouse on the legs are the consequence of environmental conditions and result in a change in the behaviour of the animals on the farm