Clémence Lesimple

ESA · URSE

Environmental enrichment, that is making the environment of animals more complex, was first designed to enhance the welfare and cognitive abilities of captive animals, and was more recently applied to farm animals. Enrichments can be sensory, physical, social, occupational, feeding-based, or a mix of these, with a view to improve animals’ welfare....

Les animaux d’élevage vivent généralement dans des environnements plus pauvres que les animaux sauvages. Or un environnement pauvre en stimulations peut induire des stéréotypies, de l’apathie ou encore de l’agressivité. Plusieurs voies peuvent être utilisées pour enrichir l’environnement : l’enrichissement peut être sensoriel (stimulation d’un ou p...

Odorant compounds that mammalian females ingest during pregnancy/lactation permeate to their perinatal offspring, impinging on progeny’s developing chemoreception and shaping subsequent preferences and behaviour. Long-term effects of these earliest experience have been repeatedly found with single flavour qualities, which induce postnatal selectivi...

This document has been produced by the EU Reference Centre for Animal Welfare - Ruminants & Equines (EURCAW Ruminants & Equines) and is freely available from this link: https://www.eurcaw-ruminants-equines.eu

This document has been produced by the EU Reference Centre for Animal Welfare - Ruminants & Equines (EURCAW Ruminants & Equines) and is freely available from this link: https://www.eurcaw-ruminants-equines.eu

Little is known about the impact of equine-assisted interventions (EAI) on equids’ perception of humans. In this study 172 equids, living in 12 riding centres, were submitted to a standardised human–horse relationship test: the motionless person test. Age, sex, type (horse/pony), housing, and feeding conditions of subjects were recorded. Overall, 1...

Horses were domesticated for more than 5000 years and have been one of the most emblematic species living alongside humans. This long-shared history would suggest that horses are well known and well understood, but scientific data raise many concerns about the welfare state of most domestic horses suggesting that many aspects have been largely misu...

Assessing chronic pain is a challenge given its subjective dimension. In humans, resting state electroencephalography (EEG) is a promising tool although the results of various studies are contradictory. Spontaneous chronic pain is understudied in animals but could be of the highest interest for a comparative study. Riding horses show a very high pr...

Although the question of animal welfare has been an important source of concern in the scientific community for several decades, many aspects are still under debate. On-farm assessments have to be rapid, acceptable to farmers and safe for both the assessors and animals. They are thus very demanding, with multiple decisions to make, such as the choi...

Animal welfare is defined as a chronic state reflecting an individual's subjective perception of its situation. Because it is possible to be in a good welfare state and nevertheless experience acute fear or pain, and conversely, short-term positive emotions can be experienced during impaired welfare states, welfare as a chronic state has to be clea...

Horses, and in particular sport horses, remain housed predominantly in single stalls. One of the main reported reasons is the fear that they will become agitated and injure themselves and thereby impair their performance if released in paddocks. The hour spent daily at work is also assumed to be sufficient to satisfy the horses’ needs for locomotio...

Several previous studies have shown that working conditions (including riding) can induce stress in horses. Riders' actions and postures, when inappropriate, induce stress and conflict behaviours during riding and welfare impairment and negative emotional states outside work. Optimistic biases have been found in leisure horses, which, amongst posit...

Despite the spatial and social restrictions it causes, single stall housing still prevails in sport and riding school horses, leading to the emergence of abnormal behaviours such as stereotypic or abnormal repetitive behaviours (SB/ARB). In the present study, we investigated the impact of the type (visual/tactile) and amount of social information t...

Despite the fact that animal posture is known to reflect emotional state, the presence of chronic postures associated with poor welfare has not been investigated with an objective tool for measuring, quantifying and comparing postures. The use of morphometric geometrics (GM) to describe horse posture (profile of the dorsum) has shown to be an effec...

The study of animal behavior, especially regarding welfare, needs the development of tools to identify, quantify and compare animal postures with interobserver reliability. While most studies subjectively describe animal postures, or quantify only limited parts of the body, the usage of geometric morphometrics has allowed for the description of hor...

Postures associated with the proportions. Results of the first two dimensions of the Principal Components Analysis performed on the GLS with the SSL method on the dorsum without neck rotation, for ‘standing motionless’. The deformation grids corresponding to each extremum of the PC1 are represented (maximum in red, minimum in blue). B = brachymorph...

Postures associated with the type of equid. Results of the first two dimensions of the Principal Components Analysis performed on the GLS with the mixed method on the dorsum without neck rotation, for ‘standing motionless’. The deformation grids corresponding to each extremum of the PC1 are represented (maximum in red, minimum in blue). (TIF)

Raptors are one of the most important causes of fatalities due to their collisions with aircrafts as well as being the main victims of collisions with constructions. They are difficult to deter because they are not influenced by other airspace users or ground predators. Because vision is the primary sensory mode of many diurnal raptors, we evaluate...

The nine visual stimuli presented to raptors. (TIF)

Location of the screens according to the runway. Red strips indicated the area to be protected. (JPG)

List of bird species present at the airport. (JPG)

Example of presence of raptors on runway before stimulus display. (JPG)

Back disorders are amongst the major health-related disorders associated to working conditions in our society. Horses share with humans the exposure to potential physically harmful working conditions leading to back disorders. However, despite their high prevalence, these problems are often unacknowledged in the horse industry, mostly because their...

Chronic pain is thought to affect patients’ cognitive functioning, including attention. Loss of attention is likely to have an impact on the execution of daily tasks, and, therefore, to have negative effects. However, relationships between chronic pain and cognitive deficits are still debated. Pre-clinical studies using laboratory animals prove use...

Très tôt dans l’histoire de la domestication du cheval par l’homme, les relations entre ces deux parties se sont centrées sur l’utilisation du premier par le second et sur des relations de travail, attelé ou monté. Ainsi, les premières estimations de l’utilisation de chevaux pour l’équitation remonteraient à 2500 ans avant JC. Ces estimations sont...

Healthcare practitioners such as physicians or nurses often underestimate patients’ well-being impairment (e.g., pain, anxiety) which may lead to undesirable consequences on treatment decisions. Lack of recognition/identification of signals and over-exposure are two reasons invoked, but a combination of factors may be involved. Studying human decod...

Questionnaires are a common tool to assess people's opinion on a large scale or to sound them out about their subjective views. The caretakers' opinion about animals' "personality" has been used in many studies. The aim of the present study was to assess whether the owners' subjective evaluation was effective to detect back disorders. Back disorder...

Postures have long been used and proved useful to describe animals' behaviours and emotional states, but remains difficult to assess objectively in field conditions. A recent study performed on horses using geometric morphometrics revealed important postural differences between 2 horse populations differing in management conditions (leisure horses...

Domestic animals are highly capable of detecting human cues, while wild relatives tend to perform less well (e.g., responding to pointing gestures). It is suggested that domestication may have led to the development of such cognitive skills. Here, we hypothesized that because domestic animals are so attentive and dependant to humans’ actions for re...

Horses’ emotional reactivity is of a major importance in riding schools where a variety of more or less experienced riders are present. Horses’ learning abilities may also be important for work. Previous studies have shown that different intrinsic or extrinsic factors, such as breed, housing conditions, sire, and work may have an influence, and tha...

[This corrects the article on p. e10257 in vol. 5.].

Back pain is the cause of bad welfare in humans and animals. Although vertebral problems are regularly reported on riding horses, these problems are not always identified nor noticed enough to prevent these horses to be used for work. Nineteen horses from two riding centres were submitted to chiropractic examinations performed by an experienced chi...

The ability to learn about chemosensory stimuli in the prenatal period is now well established in a wide variety of vertebrate species. This may help to shape development and behaviour. Evidence for early visual learning has already been shown in newly hatched cuttlefish. We exposed cuttlefish embryos to crabs for at least a week before hatching. T...