Several countries and regions have regulations in place to provide standards for the welfare of production animals, which have implications for breeding, management and trade. In the chicken egg production industry, the welfare impacts of this are not well understood. In the past decades,...

Studies investigating the welfare of commercial-line broiler chickens raised in houses with outdoor access in the tropics are scarce, and none have investigated whether responses vary according to indoor conditions. Hence, we assessed the effects of providing outdoor access at two indoor stocking...

Much research has been conducted to mitigate the impact of conventional production systems on broilers welfare, but nearly all of these studies are based on the development of strategies to improve performance parameters in temperate regions, making it difficult to implement such approaches in...

Budgerigars housed in conventional cages have no opportunity for some normal behaviours, in particular flight, and develop stereotyped behaviours. Increasingly aviaries are used for groups of budgerigars but the minimum space requirement to support normal behaviour is not known. We compared the ...

Most research to enrich the environment of psittacines in captivity has focused on foraging. Little is known about the importance of bathing substrates for enrichment of their environment, despite this being a natural behaviour that is rarely possible in captivity. Twelve captive-bred, adult...

The effects of outdoor access, stocking density, and age on broiler behavior, stress, and health indicators in a tropical climate were assessed over two seasons, winter and summer. Two hundred and forty Cobb500 male chickens were allocated to one of four treatments, with six replicates of ten birds ...

Previous studies have indicated that human gender and canine sex influences human-dog interactions. However, the majority of studies have considered the interaction when dogs were off-leash and the behavioural interactions when dogs are walked on a leash have not been addressed. This study...

Cow shelters (gaushalas) are unique traditional institutions in India, where aged, infertile, diseased, rescued, and abandoned cows are sheltered for the rest of their life, until they die of natural causes. These institutions owe their existence to the reverence for the cow as a holy mother...

Gaushala management is a specialized profession requiring particular skills relating to the management of cow shelters or gaushalas, which are traditional and ancient Indian institutions that shelter old, unproductive and abandoned cows, The 1800 registered cow shelters in India have managers who...

India, the country with the largest population of dairy cows in the world, has a policy of retiring abandoned and non-lactating cows in shelters, but the level of provision for their welfare in these shelters is unclear. Cows in 54 shelters across India were assessed for historic evidence of...