Early detection of health and welfare compromises in commercial piggeries is essential for timely intervention to enhance treatment success, reduce impact on welfare, and promote sustainable pig production. Behavioural changes that precede or accompany subclinical and clinical signs may have diagnostic value. Often referred to as sickness behaviour, this encompasses changes in feeding, drinking, and elimination behaviours, social behaviours, and locomotion and posture. Such subtle changes in behaviour are not easy to quantify and require lengthy observation input by staff, which is impractical on a commercial scale. Automated early-warning systems may provide an alternative by objectively measuring behaviour with sensors to automatically monitor and detect behavioural changes. This paper aims to: (1) review the quantifiable changes in behaviours with potential diagnostic value; (2) subsequently identify available sensors for measuring behaviours; and (3) describe the progress towards automating monitoring and detection, which may allow such behavioural changes to be captured, measured, and interpreted and thus lead to automation in commercial, housed piggeries. Multiple sensor modalities are available for automatic measurement and monitoring of behaviour, which require humans to actively identify behavioural changes. This has been demonstrated for the detection of small deviations in diurnal drinking, deviations in feeding behaviour, monitoring coughs and vocalisation, and monitoring thermal comfort, but not social behaviour. However, current progress is in the early stages of developing fully automated detection systems that do not require humans to identify behavioural changes; e.g., through automated alerts sent to mobile phones. Challenges for achieving automation are multifaceted and trade-offs are considered between health, welfare, and costs, between analysis of individuals and groups, and between generic and compromise-specific behaviours.

Early detection of health and welfare compromises through automated detection of behavioural changes in pigs

Animal domestication has resulted in changes in growth and size. It has been suggested that this may have involved selection for differences in appetite. Divergent growth between chickens selected for egg laying or meat production is one such example. The neurons expressing AGRP and POMC in the basal hypothalamus are important components of appetite regulation, as are the satiety feedback pathways that carry information from the intestine, including CCK and its receptor CCKAR (CCK1 receptor). Using 16 generations of a cross between a fast and a relatively slow growing strain of chicken has identified a region on chromosome 4 downstream of the CCKAR gene, which is responsible for up to a 19% difference in body weight at 12 wk of age. Animals possessing the high-growth haplotype at the locus have lower expression of mRNA and immunoreactive CCKAR in the brain, intestine, and exocrine organs, which is correlated with increased levels of orexigenic AGRP in the hypothalamus. Animals with the high-growth haplotype are resistant to the anorectic effect of exogenously administered CCK, suggesting that their satiety set point has been altered. Comparison with traditional breeds shows that the high-growth haplotype has been present in the founders of modern meat-type strains and may have been selected early in domestication. This is the first dissection of the physiological consequences of a genetic locus for a quantitative trait that alters appetite and gives us an insight into the domestication of animals. This will allow elucidation of how differences in appetite occur in birds and also mammals.

Decreased expression of the satiety signal receptor CCKAR is responsible for increased growth and body weight during the domestication of chickens

Review: Quantifying animal feeding behaviour with a focus on pigs

Energy intake and obesity: Ingestive frequency outweighs portion size

Pulses are low-glycaemic foods rich in protein (20-25 %), resistant starch and fibre that suppress appetite and glycaemia. The objective of the present study was to elucidate the component(s) of yellow peas responsible for these benefits and assess their efficacy as value-added food ingredients. We investigated the effects of 10 or 20 g of isolated yellow pea protein (P10 and P20) or fibre (F10 and F20) on food intake (FI) at an ad libitum pizza meal served at 30 min (Expt 1, n 19) or 120 min (Expt 2, n 20) and blood glucose (BG) and appetite in young, healthy males (20-30 years). In Expt 1, P20 led to lower FI than control (4937 (sem 502) v. 5632 (sem 464) kJ (1180 (sem 120) v. 1346 (sem 111) kcal)) and all other treatments (P < 0·01) and lower cumulative FI (pizza meal kcal+treatment kcal; CFI) compared to F10 (5460 (sem 498) v. 6084 (sem 452) kJ (1305 (sem 119) v. 1454 (sem 108) kcal); P = 0·033). Both protein treatments suppressed mean pre-meal (0-30 min) BG compared to control (P < 0·05), whereas only P20 suppressed mean post-meal (50-120 min) BG (P < 0·01). There was no effect of treatment on pre-meal or post-meal appetite. In Expt 2, there was no effect of treatment on FI, CFI, or pre- or post-meal BG or appetite. In conclusion, protein is the component responsible for the short-term effects of yellow peas in the regulation of glycaemia and FI, but its second-meal effects disappear by 2 h post-consumption.

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The effect of yellow pea protein and fibre on short-term food intake, subjective appetite and glycaemic response in healthy young men.

Meals have long been considered relevant units of feeding behavior. Large data sets of feeding behavior of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, turkeys, dolphins, and rats were analyzed with the aims of ...

https://www.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/ajpregu.00661.2010

Martin P Yeates

Papers

The temporal structure of feeding behavior.