Understanding animals’ phenotype through automatic behavior assessment
Article Published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science (Link)
Animal behaviour is an elastic trait that changes according to environmental circumstances and intrinsic properties, such as health or genetic background (i.e., breed). The term behaviour elasticity refers to the range of behaviour that an animal is capable to express. The evaluation of behaviour may be used to estimate either the adaptation capacity to a changing environment or the intrinsic properties, such as health status, temperament, etc. However, in order to identify changes in behaviour, it needs to be systematically and objectively assessed. This is because some changes in behaviour are only perceptible if it is monitored continuously, which was not feasible in traditional behaviour assessment using subjective human observations.
Precision livestock farming (PLF) has emerged as a revolutionary tool to monitor different outcomes of farm animals including behaviour, physiology, functional capacity, welfare and/or performance measures. Importantly, PLF technologies have now made continuous and systematic behaviour assessment possible. Sensor technologies offer an enormous potential to monitor individual animal behaviour and to understand how and why animals react to their environment continuously. PLF sensors can be used to assess feeding, social and play behaviour and activity, from which many other phenotypical traits can be predicted and thereby create a linkage to genotypic parameters. Therefore, behavioural data can be used for many purposes including evaluation of animal’s resilience to the environment, monitoring their performance and welfare and assessing the genetic merit of breeding animals.
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