The Poultry Podcast Show - #7 - The Happiness of Chickens: Welfare Perspectives

As we discuss the future of poultry production, animal welfare always comes up as a hot topic – but what do we really know about it? Is it possible to understand what and how a chicken feels? Measuring emotion and affective state in chickens is quite a novel and complex field of study in poultry welfare. And that’s the central theme of this episode: the nuances and difficulties in evaluating the emotions of chickens. So I talked to Dr. Leonie Jacobs about the importance of understanding poultry behavior and response to different environments and resources, as well as practices to evaluate and improve it. Finally, we discuss how educating people to pay more attention to those aspects can have a positive and direct impact on the final outcome.

What you’ll learn:

1. How to measure emotion and affective state in chickens

2. How the environment affects the affective state of birds

3. How to evaluate welfare on different strains

4. How to improve chicken welfare on the last day post-harvest

5. Future poultry welfare programs

6. How to educate people on chicken welfare

7. Some take home lessons

Meet the guest: Dr. Leonie Jacobs has two MS degrees in Animal Sciences, one being from Wageningen University (Netherlands) and the other one from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Also, she has received her Ph.D. in Veterinary Science at Ghent University (Belgium). Dr. Jacobs has worked as an Assistant Professor of Animal Welfare and Behavior at Virginia Tech since 2017. As a tenure-track faculty member , her aim is to improve the welfare of production animals, and her current research is focused on quantifying and determining emotion and positive affect, sustainable poultry agriculture, and the benefits of environmental complexity for poultry.

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