Assessing Animal Welfare: A Guide to Valid Use of Indicators of Affective States

Clear, practical guide on how to assess animal welfare scientifically

Assessing Animal Welfare is a guide on how to assess animal welfare at the individual rather than the farm or group level. The focus of this book is construct validity or the degree to which animal-based measures adequately assess the construct of welfare.

For a selection of common indicators of welfare, each chapter evaluates evidence for the indicator’s validity, highlights limitations in its sensitivity and specificity, and provides guidance on its interpretation and associated pitfalls. The book also shows how indicators can complement each other but also give different results, with real-life examples showing how to put theory into practice.

Written by leading animal welfare science experts in their respective fields, Assessing Animal Welfare discusses:

• Four key approaches to show that a welfare indicator has construct validity: using humans as a model, taking a pharmacological approach, exposing animals to rewarding or punishing reinforcers, and exposing animals to threaters/promoters of ancestral fitness
• Indicators of emotion including preference/avoidance (active and passive), signals and expressions, acute cort responses, body temperature and heart rate (HR), and HR variability
• Indicators of mood including judgement biases, play, reward sensitivity measures, and indicators of anxiety
• Indicators of cumulative welfare including abnormal repetitive behaviors, DHEA, immunological changes, cellular aging, and hippocampal cell/volume loss

Assessing Animal Welfare serves as a a clear and practical guide for animal welfare researchers and veterinarians to select and use the most common animal welfare indicators in a variety of settings.