Contrafreeloading (CFL) refers to animals’ tendency to prefer obtaining food through effort rather than accessing food that is freely available. Researchers have proposed various hypotheses to explain this intriguing phenomenon, but few studies have provided a comprehensive analysis of the factors influencing this behaviour. In this study, we observed the choice of alternative food containers in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) to investigate their CFL tendencies and the effects of pre-training, food deprivation, and effort required on the CFL tasks. The results showed that budgerigars did not exhibit significant difference in their first choices or the time interacting with less challenging versus more challenging food containers. Moreover, when evaluating each budgerigar’s CFL level, only half of them were identified as strong contrafreeloaders. Thus, we suggest that budgerigars exhibit an intermediate CFL level that lies somewhere between a strong tendency and the absence of such behaviour. Furthermore, we also found that food-deprived budgerigars tended to select less challenging food containers, and pre-trained budgerigars were more likely to choose highly challenging food containers than moderately challenging food containers, which means that the requirement of only a reasonable effort (access to food from moderately challenging food containers in this study) and the experience of pre-training act to enhance their CFL levels, whereas the requirement of greater effort and the experience of food deprivation act to decrease their CFL levels. Studying animal CFL can help understand why animals choose to expend effort to obtain food rather than accessing it for free, and it also has implications for setting feeding environments to enhance the animal welfare of captive and domesticated animals.

The governance of farm animal welfare is led, in certain countries and sectors, by industry organisations. The aim of this study was to analyse the legitimacy of industry-led farm animal welfare governance focusing on two examples: the Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Dairy Cattle and the Animal Care module of the proAction programme in Canada, and the Animal Care module of the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) programme in the United States (US). Both are dairy cattle welfare governance programmes led by industry actors who create the standards and audit farms for compliance. We described the normative legitimacy of these systems, based on an input, throughput, and output framework, by performing a document analysis on publicly available information from these organisations’ websites and found that the legitimacy of both systems was enhanced by their commitment to science, the presence of accountability systems to enforce standards, and wide participation by dairy farms. The Canadian system featured more balanced representation, and their standard development process uses a consensus-based model, which bolsters legitimacy compared to the US system. However, the US system was more transparent regarding audit outcomes than the Canadian system. Both systems face challenges to their legitimacy due to heavy industry representation and limited transparency as to how public feedback is addressed in the standards. These Canadian and US dairy industry standards illustrate strengths and weakness of industry-led farm animal welfare governance.

There is increasing recognition that the welfare needs of cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans are important. Current commercial practices involving these animals include a range of potential threats to their welfare, such as conditions of farming, capture, transport, and slaughter. This article draws from and updates our 2021 review for the UK Government, recommending a range of relatively simple and impactful changes that could benefit welfare while highlighting important research gaps that should be prioritised to facilitate the drafting of guidelines for best-practice.

Pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) and most other farmed species are social animals for whom social isolation is known to cause stress. However, their social nature is commonly ignored in behavioural and cognitive tasks, on which they are trained and tested individually, which may impact their welfare and the validity of test results. We chose the Judgement Bias Task (JBT), a promising proxy measure of affective states, to compare training duration, task performance and behaviour of pigs trained and tested in social isolation (ISO; n = 12) with pigs trained and tested with physical and visual contact to social companions through an opening covered with wire mesh (SOC; n = 12). Eleven SOC pigs and eight ISO pigs learned the task, but SOC and ISO pigs did not differ in training duration or task performance when tested. However, ISO pigs showed a higher frequency of all behavioural measures indicative of stress, i.e. high-pitched vocalisation, freezing, exit-approaching behaviour, heavy escape attempts, defaecation and urination compared to SOC pigs. Future research should replicate our study, additionally in combination with other treatments like different housing conditions, to investigate potential interacting effects on learning and task performance. Several open questions remain, but the unambiguous behavioural differences we found strongly advocate for more research to decrease the stress and thus improve the welfare of pigs and other social animals used in behavioural and cognitive tasks.

Pain monitoring and diagnosis are crucial in seeking to improve animal welfare. This pilot study aimed to investigate the impact of long hours observation on pain assessment and the intra-observer reliability in piglets using video recording. A total of ten piglets, five from the control group (sham castration; pain-free) and five from the pain group (surgical castration; pain-state), were video-recorded immediately post-castration. The videos were randomised and assessed by an experienced observer using the Unesp-Botucatu Pig Composite Acute Pain Scale (UPAPS). The same ten videos were watched at three different times (trial initiation, half-way point, trial termination) with a four-week interval between them. During the four-week interval periods, the observer watched an additional 360 videos from another study to simulate long observation periods. For the pain group, no differences were found in the post hoc test for the UPAPS total score, and most of the UPAPS items. In contrast, for the control group, the UPAPS total score was higher at the half-way time-point, and no differences were found between UPAPS items. The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) inferred ‘very good’ intra-observer reliability for UPAPS total score in all time-points of assessment for both groups. Video-recorded pain assessment is a reliable method to assess pain in piglets given that observation duration for pain assessment had only minimal impact on the UPAPS total score, and no differences were found among most of the items. From an animal welfare standpoint, video-recorded pain assessment is a non-invasive method, that can be an additional asset for pain research.

It is widely accepted that we ought to avoid taking excessive risks of causing gratuitous suffering. The practical implications of this truism, however, depend on how we understand what counts as an excessive risk. Precautionary frameworks help us decide when a risk exceeds the threshold for action, with the recent Birch et al. (2021) framework for assessing invertebrate sentience being one such example. The Birch et al. framework uses four neurobiological and four behavioural criteria to provide an evidence-based standard that can be used in determining when precautionary action to promote invertebrate welfare may be warranted. Our aim in this discussion paper is to provide a new motivation for the threshold approach that the Birch et al. framework represents while simultaneously identifying some possible revisions to the framework that can reduce false positives without abandoning the framework’s precautionary objectives.