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To limit tail biting incidence, most pig producers in Europe tail dock their piglets. This is despite EU Council Directive 2008/120/EC banning routine tail docking and allowing it only as a last resort. The paper aims to understand what it takes to fulfil the intentions of the Directive by examining economic results of four management and housing scenarios, and by discussing their consequences for animal welfare in the light of legal and ethical considerations. The four scenarios compared are: 'Standard Docked', a conventional housing scenario with tail docking meeting the recommendations for Danish production (0.7 m2/pig); 'Standard Undocked', which is the same as 'Standard Docked' but with no tail docking, 'Efficient Undocked' and 'Enhanced Undocked', which have increased solid floor area (0.9 and 1.0 m2/pig, respectively) provision of loose manipulable materials (100 and 200 g/straw per pig per day) and no tail docking. A decision tree model based on data from Danish and Finnish pig production suggests that Standard Docked provides the highest economic gross margin with the least tail biting. Given our assumptions, Enhanced Undocked is the least economic, although Efficient Undocked is better economically and both result in a lower incidence of tail biting than Standard Undocked but higher than Standard Docked. For a pig, being bitten is worse for welfare (repeated pain, risk of infections) than being docked, but to compare welfare consequences at a farm level means considering the number of affected pigs. Because of the high levels of biting in Standard Undocked, it has on average inferior welfare to Standard Docked, whereas the comparison of Standard Docked and Enhanced (or Efficient) Undocked is more difficult. In Enhanced (or Efficient) Undocked, more pigs than in Standard Docked suffer from being tail bitten, whereas all the pigs avoid the acute pain of docking endured by the pigs in Standard Docked. We illustrate and discuss this ethical balance using numbers derived from the above-mentioned data. We discuss our results in the light of the EU Directive and its adoption and enforcement by Member States. Widespread use of tail docking seems to be accepted, mainly because the alternative steps that producers are required to take before resorting to it are not specified in detail. By tail docking, producers are acting in their own best interests. We suggest that for the practice of tail docking to be terminated in a way that benefits animal welfare, changes in the way pigs are housed and managed may first be required.

Early life experiences can be important in determining offspring phenotypes and may influence interaction with the environment and hence health, welfare, and productivity. The prenatal environment of poultry can be divided into the pre-lay environment and the egg storage/incubation environment, both of which can affect offspring outcomes. The ability to separate maternal and egg/incubation effects makes birds well suited to this type of research. There are many factors, including feeding and nutrition, environmental conditions, husbandry practices, housing system, social environment, infectious environment, and maternal health status, that can influence both the health and performance and behavior and cognition of the offspring. There are some aspects of the environments that can be changed to produce beneficial effects in the offspring, like addition of certain additives to feed or short changes in incubation temperatures, while other aspects should be avoided to reduce negative effects, such as unpredictable feeding and lighting regimens. Measures of offspring characteristics may prove to be a useful method of assessing parent stock welfare if known stressors result in predictable offspring outcomes. This has the advantage of assessing the parent environment without interfering with the animals and possibly affecting their responses and could lead to improved welfare for the animals., (© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Poultry Science Association.)

Scientific assessment of affective states in animals is challenging but vital for animal welfare studies. One possible approach is Qualitative Behavioural Assessment (QBA), a 'whole animal' methodology which integrates information from multiple behavioural signals and styles of behavioural expression (body language) directly in terms of an animal's emotional expression. If QBA provides a valid measure of animals' emotional state it should distinguish between groups where emotional states have been manipulated. To test this hypothesis, QBA was applied to video-recordings of pigs, following treatment with either saline or the neuroleptic drug Azaperone, in either an open field or elevated plus-maze test. QBA analysis of these recordings was provided by 12 observers, blind to treatment, using a Free Choice Profiling (FCP) methodology. Generalised Procrustes Analysis was used to calculate a consensus profile, consisting of the main dimensions of expression. Dimension one was positively associated with terms such as 'Confident' and 'Curious' and negatively with 'Unsure' and 'Nervous'. Dimension two ranged from 'Agitated'/'Angry' to 'Calm'/'Relaxed'. In both tests, Azaperone pre-treatment was associated with a more positive emotionality (higher scores on dimension one reflecting a more confident/curious behavioural demeanour) than control pigs. No effect of drug treatment on dimension two was found. Relationships between qualitative descriptions of behaviour and quantitative behavioural measures, taken from the same recordings, were found. Overall, this work supports the use of QBA for the assessment of emotionality in animals.