Acknowledgements Book of abstracts - Publicaties - Vlaanderen.be

Jennifer Brown presents Oral paper 8
In session 2: Assessing emotional state and human-animal relations
Thursday, 11 September 2008 from 14h45-15h00 in the Aula chaired by Susanne Waiblinger
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Oral paper 8
REPEATABILITY WITHIN AND AGREEMENT BETWEEN
TEMPERAMENT TESTS IN GROUP-HOUSED FINISHING PIGS
J. Brown 1 , C. Dewey 2 , I.B. Mandell 1 , P.P. Purslow 3 , A.B. Robinson 1 , J. Squires 1 , T. Widowski 1
1 Department of Animal and Poultry Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
2 Department of Population Medicine, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
3 Department of Food Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Despite similarities in genetics and experience, pigs show large variation in stress responses during
pre-slaughter handling. If this variation is due to differences in behavioural tendencies, then onfarm
assessment of responses to humans or novel situations may be predictive of the stress response
at transport and slaughter. This study looked at behavioural testing of group-housed finishing pigs,
with the objective of validating tests which could be applied in commercial settings.
Behavioural responses of pigs to three temperament tests were studied using 118 finishing pigs at
approximately 6 months. Pigs were housed in 8 pens with 7-8 pigs per pen, in two replicate trails.
Tests included a human approach test (HAT), novel object test (NOT) and open door test (ODT),
and were performed in the home pen on three days. Animals were scored on their latency to contact
the human or object, or to leave the pen. On each day, the HAT was performed twice by different
observers. Repeatability within-test was evaluated using repeated measures mixed model with pig
as a random effect nested in pen and replicate, and agreement between days, observers and tests
was evaluated by partial correlation coefficient after removal of replicate, pen and day effects.
For all three tests, latency differed between days (p