How Studying Interactions Between Animal Emotions, Cognition, and Personality Can Contribute to Improve Farm - Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals - page 98

This not only reduces the animals' stress but also facilitates their manage-
ment (better human

animal relationship), and consequently increases their

welfare.

Eliciting Positive Emotions by Enriching the Environment
and Management
Traditionally, the focus has been on the negative side of animal welfare that
is acute fear and chronic stress (see above). This strategy produced animal
welfare benefits, but at best it could only lift a poor welfare status to a
neutral one. However, welfare is based on a balance between negative and
positive experiences ( Dawkins, 1990; Duncan, 1996; Mellor, 2012; Spruijt
et al., 2001 ), and it is now widely accepted that positive welfare is not
simply the absence or reduction of negative experiences but needs also the
expression of positive ones such as pleasure and comfort (for a review, see
Boissy et al., 2007b ). Therefore, in addition to the assessment of negative
experiences it is now necessary to consider both positive expectations (what
an animal “likes”) and resources that an animal is motivated to obtain
(what an animal “wants”). However, despite the efforts of pioneering authors
such as Colin Allen, Jaak Panksepp, or Kent Berridge, relatively little had
been done until recently to understand positive experiences in comparison
with their negative counterparts. As an emerging field in animal welfare, there
is now a growing interest in positive emotions and enrichment in captive ani-
mals. We present the current efforts to induce positive animal welfare based
on the environmental enrichment and the improvement of human animal

relationships.

Environmental Enrichment
Although it is often recommended that the animals' environment should
be predictable and controllable ( Bassett and Buchanan-Smith, 2007 )an
invariable and overly predictable one should be avoided as it may result
in boredom ( Van Rooijen, 1984 ). Environmental enrichment generally
involves incorporating new, putatively interesting stimuli in the home
environment and thereby increasing its complexity and stimulus value.
This promotes desirable behaviors like foraging, exploration, social play,
and grooming in pigs ( Van de Weerd et al., 2003; Bracke et al., 2006; Spinka
et al.,2001 ), cattle ( Wilson et al.,2002 ), and poultry ( Jones, 2004 ), reduces
excitability and fear in pigs (Grandin et al., 1987) and sheep (Vandenheede
and Bouissou, 1998), as well as reduces neophobia in poultry ( Jones, 2004 ).
There is mounting evidence that animals housed in enriched conditions
have more positive affective states compared to those housed in more
barren environments. This belief is supported by the cognitive bias assess-
ments, that report more optimistic cognitive biases in laboratory rats