Animal Welfare

Research on animal welfare aims at finding ways to better assess and understand the needs of domestic and captive animals, in order to improve their housing environment and management. Reducing stress associated to the physical and social environments they are kept in, but also increasing positive experiences are paramount to good welfare.

Using a multidisciplinary approach (behaviour, physiology and cognition), our research focuses on reliably assessing stress response in various conditions (preslaughter and farrowing environments), understanding of social behaviour and cognition (social preferences, emotional contagion, prosociality, helping behaviour, cooperation) and developing new tools for monitoring of behaviour and assessing stress reactivity (biomarkers) in various domestic species including pigs, horses and cows, as well as in wild species, such as fallow and roe deer.