Animal welfare.

Chapter 11 (Page no: 213)

Preference and motivation research.

A major approach in animal welfare science involves research on animals' preferences for options such as ambient temperature, illumination, and types of flooring, and on the strength of animals' motivation to perform certain types of behaviour, obtain certain resources and avoid unpleasant features of their housing and handling. Various cautions need to be taken into account in such research. The preferences of an animal are likely to vary with the animal's condition, the time of day, environmental conditions and the animal's ongoing behaviour; therefore, preference experiments must be comprehensive enough to identify the relevant sources of variation. Experiments must also avoid confounding preference with familiarity. Preference research is most useful if it identifies the factors underlying the preferences that animals show. To draw inferences about animal welfare from preference research generally requires that we establish how strongly an animal prefers a chosen option or is motivated to perform a type of behaviour (such as nest building or exploration) that a given environment allows. Various measures of motivation strength have been used, mostly based on determining how hard an animal will work, or what other benefits it will forgo, to obtain a preferred option. The conditions preferred by an animal will often promote its welfare. However, preferences may not correspond to welfare if the choices fall outside the animals' sensory, cognitive and affective capacities, or if animals are asked to make choices very unlike those that would have occurred in the environment where the species evolved. There is great scope for incorporating knowledge of animals' preferences and motivations into the design of animal housing and management, and for integrating preference research with other indicators of animal welfare.

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