Christian Manteuffel

• Dr.
• Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology

Vocalisations and activity are important factors for monitoring animal behaviour. Previous studies have shown that these parameters are altered in the context of disease, farrowing and distress. In the highly standardized conditions of livestock farming, these contexts are often closely linked to specific areas of the barn-enabling to infer informa...

Helping behaviour is of special interest for prosociality because it appears to be motivated by the needs of others. We developed a novel paradigm to investigate helping in pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) and tested 75 individuals in eight groups in their home pens. Two identical compartments were attached to the pen, equipped with a window, and a doo...

Helping behaviour is of special interest for the study of prosociality because it appears to be motivated by the needs of others. We developed a novel paradigm to investigate helping behaviour in pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) and tested n = 75 individuals in eight groups in their home pens. During familiarization, two identical compartments were att...

Signal-feeding is a discrimination task for pigs where individual acoustic signals indicate the availability of feed at an electronic feeding station. It has been shown that this feeding technique has the potential to reduce agonistic interactions between pigs and improve animal welfare. As a side effect, signal-feeding was found to facilitate the...

Simple Summary Immune cells are of increasing interest for cellular therapeutic products to treat inflammation-related diseases and cancer. However, the isolation method and the culture conditions influence the cells’ functionality. In contrast to dendritic cells and macrophages, the effects of the isolation method on the functionality of non-adher...

Economic viability is a fundamental precondition for the practical adoption of innovations in livestock farming. While precision agriculture bears the potential for a drastic reduction of manual labour and resource use, the economic potential of precision livestock farming (PLF) is limited by biological, ethical and ecological boundaries. At the sa...

The automation of stimulus-controlled operant conditioning gains more and more relevance in management applications for farm animals. Recent examples are solutions for virtual fencing and latrine training. Such systems need to assess the learning progress of the animals in order not to overburden their adaptive capacity. Classically, the learning p...

Innovations related to animal care in livestock production increasingly rely on the automation of management procedures utilizing machines and robots. However, current solutions incorporate animals mainly passively, e.g. by measuring their health status and predicting their behavior. This approach neglects that animals are able to signal their need...

Animal welfare can be viewed as the result of integrating repeated affective evaluations of success in coping with environmental challenges, i.e., subjective challenge adequacy. The present work summarizes why established physiological and behavioral welfare parameters are inadequate to assess challenge adequacy. Behavioral tests based on the mood-...

Simple Summary Monocytes are immune cells of increasing interest as cellular-based therapeutic products in inflammation-related diseases. The underlying mechanism is that isolated monocytes are modified outside the body. After re-injection, monocytes are recruited to the site of inflammation, exerting their therapeutic effect. One current challenge...

URL: http://ign-nutztierhaltung.ch/sites/default/files/PDF/IGN_Spezial_21_Symposium_Kognition.pdf Editors Christian Nawroth, Nina Keil, Jan Langbein ISBN:978-3-9525478-2-3

General activity behaviour can be an indicator of numerous conditions in farm animals depending on the context of the measurement. Currently, most activity sensors established in livestock farming are optical or animal-attached sensors. Animal-attached sensors are hard to manage especially with smaller species. Optical sensors are susceptible to re...

The acceptance of animal products is increasingly associated with standardized animal welfare, which relates to appropriate animal husbandry from birth to slaughter. In particular, shipment to the slaughterhouse is considered as a critical process exposing the animals to a number of, in part severe, stressors. New biomarkers may be useful for the a...

Fatal piglet crushing by the mother sow is a pervasive economic and animal welfare issue in piglet production. To keep the mother sow in a farrowing cage is the established countermeasure. This facility is a compromise that results in an impairment of the sows’ welfare to the benefit of her piglets and the farmer. A natural behaviour pattern which...

In response to the increasing public demand for the respect of animal welfare in the livestock production practices, the identification and validation of objective biomarkers for a standardized monitoring of the health and welfare of livestock are needed. However, the value of stress-associated blood parameters, such as glucocorticoids, catecholami...

Background and Aims For the documentation of animal welfare, animal-based indicators and biomarkers are still missing. In humans acute or chronic stress and severe illness were demonstrated to impact on pulsatile GH secretion, resulting in differential expression patterns of distinct compounds from the IGF-system. We therefore have asked if members...

Many studies found an increased average activity in groups of sows, up to 48 h before the onset of parturition. The most recent studies developed this approach further to an individual indication of the near onset of parturition using accelerometers attached to sows. The current study carried this individual indication approach over to contactless...

Recent studies show that the onset of parturition in sows could be detected up to 48 h before the parturition actually started. Such detections are based on the monitoring of the parturition related activity increase using automated electronic systems. This enables a qualitative parturition indication in terms of categories such as " upcoming " or...

Zusammenfassung Wie Wildschweine zeigen auch domestizierte Sauen vor dem Abferkeln eine erhöhte Aktivität und Nestbauverhalten. Über automatisierte Aktivitätsmessungen kann deshalb die bevorstehende Geburt tierindividuell festgestellt und signalisiert werden. Diese Hinweise sind jedoch über einen Zeitraum von 0-48 Stunden vor der Geburt verteilt. D...

Piglet mortality can be a large economic and animal welfare issue in breeding facilities. A system that predicts the parturition can help the breeder in economically organising staff assignments in order to achieve an optimal workload levelling. In the current study, light barriers at the head and torso region of a sow were used to measure and clas...

The aim of this study was to evaluate whether an infrared thermometer, a pyrometer, could detect the body surface temperature in the orbital area of gilts without contacting them. Furthermore, it was tested whether an increase in the gilts' temperatures could be detected. Therefore, fever was induced. During 11 trials, 43 German Landrace gilts were...

Recent approaches to minimise piglet crushing are usually active interventions in the behaviour of the piglets or the sow. However, interfering pig behaviour with the help of actuators has rarely been studied with respect to suitability, effectiveness and impact on animal welfare. In this study floor vibration and air-blows as methods to trigger po...

A call feeding station in which sows learn to be allowed to enter a feeding station only after being called by an individual acoustic signal has been shown to reduce agonistic interactions in front of the feeding station. Here, we tested important prerequisites for integration of a call feeding station in common husbandry practice of group-housed s...

in electronic feeding for gestating sows aggressive interactions most frequently occur while queuing at the feeders’ entrance. this may lead to severe injuries. call feeding has been developed to diminish this drawback while at the same time providing a cognitive challenge for the sows. results from a total of 67 gestating sows that had been traine...

The aim of this study was to identify a low risk method to induce fever in gilts and to evaluate vaginal sensors for temperature monitoring. Therefore, a rhinitis atrophicans vaccine was used to induce fever to evaluate sensors and behavioral patterns. During 11 trials, two of four animals were injected with 2 mL of the vaccine Porcilis AR-T DF (In...

Call feeding for pregnant sows is a novel modular extension of a conventional electronic feeder (PigTek INTEC MAC) communicating via ISOagriNET. The call feeding module (CFM) assigns individual calls to each animal of a group supplied by one feeder and trains them to associate that call with feed access. Afterwards it actively calls sows to the fee...

The aim of the study was to test whether adult sows are able to learn an individual acoustic signal for call-feeding in groups supplied with an electronic feeder. Further, we investigated whether and how the social rank of sows affects learning success. Thirty-six sows were examined in 6 successive trials. In each, the animals were kept together fo...