Processing of environmental stimuli and farm animal welfare
A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Animal Welfare".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2021) | Viewed by 11810
Special Issue Editors
Interests: emotions; behavioural lateralization; acoustic communication; farm animal welfare; pigs; cattle; automatic welfare assessment
Special Issue Information
Although farm animals live in very different environments compared to their natural ancestors, their living conditions are no less diverse or complex, with humans acting both as predators and caretakers, a variety of social challenges (from isolation to regrouping and overcrowding) and regular confrontation with new environments. These environmental stimuli challenge farm animals both cognitively and emotionally. Investigating how farm animals perceive their environment and specifically how they process and evaluate environmental stimuli helps us understand the animal’s point of view. This is an important step towards assessing modern housing environments and the impact they have on farm animal welfare. It can ultimately lead to improvements in farm animal housing and management for better welfare. This Special Issue is therefore dedicated to articles (original research papers or reviews) that increase our knowledge of farm animals’ emotional and cognitive evaluation of environmental stimuli in different farming contexts. We aim to highlight research that clarifies how the influences of animal housing and management on animal welfare are mediated, using established or novel indicators of affective processing of environmental, biotic or abiotic stimuli, e.g., behavioural lateralisation or cognitive bias.
Dr. Lisette M.C. Leliveld
Dr. Sandra Düpjan
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- emotion
- cognitive processing
- animal behaviour
- farm animal welfare
- cerebral lateralisation
- cognitive bias
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