Many laying hen companies in the United States are pledging to move away from intensive conventional cages to extensive housing systems. Enriched colony cages (ECC) are a practical alternative to conventional cage systems. Scientific research is limited on the effects of ECC on hen production and ...

Gestation sow housing is a contemporary animal welfare issue with legislative actions in the United States to ban individual gestation sow systems. This review sought to summarize the scientific literature since earlier reviews were published in 2004 and 2005. Seventeen papers comparing effect of ...

The present investigation was planned to study the welfare and behavior performance of laying hens at two different stocking densities and flock size in conventional California cages. A total of 180 commercial White Leghorn (strain BV 300) layers were divided into four groups with six replicates...

Commercial housing conditions may contribute to chronic negative stress in broiler chickens, reducing their animal welfare. The objective of this study was to determine how secretory (fecal) and plasma immunoglobulin-A (IgA) levels in fast-growing broilers respond to positive and negative housing...

This paper is an integral part of the special publication series that arose from the multidisciplinary and multi-institutional project of the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply (CSES). The CSES project involves 3 housing systems for egg production at the same research farm site in the Midwest,...

Dogs experience both acute and chronic stress when living in animal shelters. Current best practices recommend a variety of techniques for reducing stress such as enhanced human interactions including play or training, novel feeding strategies, increased exercise/group play, and, when possible,...

Farrowing stalls are used in the United States swine industry to reduce pre-weaning piglet mortality, enable efficient individual animal management, and decrease facility construction and operating costs. The quantity and quality of space provided for sows and piglets in farrowing stalls are...

Our objective was to investigate the associations between herd-level factors and lying behavior of high-producing dairy cows housed in freestall barns. Lying behavior of approximately 40 focal cows in one high-producing pen was monitored on each of 40 farms in the northeastern United States (NE)...

Assessing how cats cope with the housing and husbandry at shelters is an important part of maintaining good animal welfare. There are non-invasive methods to assess how cats cope with their environment. The aim of this study was to investigate the reliability of the behaviours used in an extended ...