AnimalBehavior-Based Welfare Evaluation Model for Sustainable Domestic Animal Care Systems

Abstract

Behavior is one of the most straightforward and non-invasive means to understand the internal status of a domestic animal; however, welfare assessment in commercial and household environments relies heavily on clinical examination at intervals and subjective judgment of the caretaker. This paper introduces an Animal Behavior-Based Welfare Evaluation (ABWE) framework, where commonly observed behaviors are transformed into a welfare assessment score that can be applied in sustainable domestic animal care systems. The ABWE framework categorizes behaviors into five domains, which are locomotion and activity, feeding and ingestion, socialization, rest, and abnormal/stereotypical behaviors, each having associated indicators, observation methods, and scoring categories. Scores are weighted together based on the relative importance of each category towards overall welfare without resorting to sophisticated instruments and physiological sampling. The proposed framework integrates the consideration of sustainability in welfare assessment, through the association between welfare status, resource consumption, effort needed to conduct welfare assessment, and animal management. A procedure for staged implementation, consisting of baseline observation, scoring of indicators, aggregation, and management feedback, is outlined here to facilitate implementation across species and across contexts, from smallholder households to managed facilities. The model is intended to be inexpensive, repeatable, and interpretable by nonspecialists, allowing welfare to be better recognized and managed. This paper presents the ABWE model as a bridge between the well-developed discipline of ethological welfare science and the everyday practice of sustainable animal care.