Eimear Murphy

Play has been proposed as a promising indicator of positive animal welfare. We aimed to study play in rats across contexts (conspecific/heterospecific) and types (social: pinning, being pinned; solitary: scampering), and we investigated its structure using behavioral sequence analysis. Group-housed (three per cage) adolescent male Lister Hooded rat...

Low birth weight (LBW) in humans is a risk factor for later cognitive, behavioural and emotional problems. In pigs, LBW is associated with higher mortality, but little is known about consequences for surviving piglets. Alteration in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis function in LBW pigs suggests altered emotionality, but no behavioural indicators...

Pigs are commonly kept in intensive farming systems. Their use as model animals in biomedical research has increased. Both conditions may impact upon their welfare. Recent definitions of welfare emphasize the importance of emotion. Mood congruent biases in judgement have been proposed as proxy measures of emotion in animals; optimistic responses to...

We studied the ability of pigs to discriminate tone cues using successive and conditional discrimination tasks. Pigs (n = 8) were trained in a successive discrimination Go/No-Go task (Experiment 1) to associate a Go-cue with a reward at the end of a runway and a No-Go-cue with the absence of reward. Latency to reach the goal-box was recorded for ea...

Farm animal welfare is inextricably linked to, and limited by, the welfare potential of the production system. Welfare potential is determined by the method of production, with key housing features and the genetics of the animal being the primary defining factors. Housing systems with close confinement, or using animals selected for productivity to...

This chapter reviews assessing emotions in pigs, specifically focusing on the ways of determining negative and positive mental states. It begins by examining behavioural indicators of emotion such as behavioural tests, qualitative behaviour assessment, vocalisations, play behaviour, defence cascade responses and facial expression and body posture....

Poor reproducibility is considered a serious problem in laboratory animal research, with important scientific, economic, and ethical implications. One possible source of conflicting findings in laboratory animal research are environmental differences between animal facilities combined with rigorous environmental standardization within studies. Due...

A tacit assumption in laboratory animal research is that animals housed within the same cage or pen are phenotypically more similar than animals from different cages or pens, due to their shared housing environment. This assumption drives experimental design, randomization schemes, and statistical analysis plans, while neglecting social context. He...

The manner in which laboratory rodents are housed is driven by economics (minimal use of space and resources), ergonomics (ease of handling and visibility of animals), hygiene, and standardization (reduction of variation). This has resulted in housing conditions that lack sensory and motor stimulation and restrict the expression of species-typical...

Judgement bias tasks are promising tools to assess emotional valence in animals, however current designs are often time-consuming and lack aspects of validity. This study aimed to establish an improved design that addresses these issues and can be used across species. Horses, rats, and mice were trained on a spatial Go/No-go task where animals coul...

We studied how space allowance affects measures of animal welfare in mice by systematically varying group size and cage type across three levels each in both males and females of two strains of mice (C57BL/6ByJ and BALB/cByJ; n = 216 cages, a total of 1152 mice). This allowed us to disentangle the effects of total floor area, group size, stocking d...

Biases in judgement of ambiguous stimuli, as measured in a judgement bias task, have been proposed as a measure of the valence of affective states in animals. We recently suggested a list of criteria for behavioural tests of emotion, one of them stating that responses on the task used to assess emotionality should not be confounded by, among others...

Assessing emotion in animals is fundamental to the study of animal welfare with methodologies for reliable and valid assessments being highly desirable. Qualitative Behaviour Assessment (QBA) is based on the assumption that human observers are capable of integrating details of animals’ behavioural expressions using descriptors (e.g. calm, playful)...

The welfare consequences of long-distance transportation of animals remain a controversial topic. Animals that stand for most of the long journey (especially if additional muscular activity is required to deal with postural instability) are at risk of developing fatigue. Previous observational studies of behaviour and physiology suggested either th...

Subordinate domestic pigs show behavioural tactics similar to the ones described as tactical deception in primates and corvids when foraging with scrounging dominants for a single monopolizable food source. Here we investigated further whether they can learn deceptive tactics to counter a scrounger by first retrieving the smaller of two hidden food...