Lisa M Collins

University of Leeds · School of Biology

Antibiotic resistance (ABR) or the silent pandemic is a major global health and economic issue, threatening both modern healthcare and food production. There is increasing concern that the presence of antibiotics in the environment may select for the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance. Currently environmental regulatory guidelines fail t...

Environmental stressors to which a foetus is exposed, affect a range of physiological functions in post-natal offspring. We aimed to determine the in-utero effect of steroid hormones on reproductive potential of female offspring using a porcine model. Reproductive tracts of pigs from female-biased (>65% female, n = 15), non-biased (45–54.9% female,...

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resi...

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resi...

Changes in free-roaming dog population size are important indicators of the effectiveness of dog population management. Assessing the effectiveness of different management methods also requires estimating the processes that change population size, such as the rates of recruitment into and removal from a population. This is one of the first studies...

Pigmeat is the most consumed red meat globally and consumption is expected to continue to increase. The sector is faced by the risk of epidemic and endemic disease impacts and other adverse influences. The aim of this study was to develop a dynamic simulation model of pig growing and finishing that can be used to model the financial and economic im...

Background There are a range of policies and guidelines focused on meat consumption which aim to tackle health and environmental issues. Policies are often siloed in nature and propose universal limits on consumption. Despite this, there will be a number of conflicts and trade-offs between interest groups. This study explores secondary impacts asso...

Environmental stressors to which a foetus is exposed, affect a range of physiological functions in post-natal offspring. Such stressors include disproportionate steroid hormone concentrations in the uterine environment. We aimed to determine the in-utero effect of steroid hormones on reproductive potential of female offspring using a porcine model....

Free-roaming dogs can present significant challenges to public health, wildlife conservation, and livestock production. Free-roaming dogs may also experience poor health and welfare. Dog population management is widely conducted to mitigate these issues. To ensure efficient use of resources, it is critical that effective, cost-efficient, and high-w...

In humans and rats, changes in affect are known to occur during pregnancy, however it is unknown how gestation may influence mood in other non-human mammals. This study assessed changes in pigs' judgment bias as a measure of affective state throughout gestation. Pigs were trained to complete a spatial judgment bias task with reference to positive a...

The projected rise in the global human population and the anticipated increase in demand for meat and animal products, albeit with a greatly reduced environmental footprint, offers a difficult set of challenges to the livestock sector. Primarily, how do we produce more, but in a way that is healthier for the animals, public, and the environment? Im...

Changes in free-roaming dog population size are important indicators of the effectiveness of dog population management. Assessing the effectiveness of different management methods also requires estimating the processes that change population size, such as the rates of recruitment into and removal from a population. This is one of the first studies...

Free-roaming dog population management is conducted to mitigate risks to public health, livestock losses, wildlife conservation, and dog health and welfare. This study aimed to determine attitudes towards free-roaming dogs and their management and describe dog ownership practices in three European countries. We distributed an online questionnaire c...

Free-roaming dogs can present significant challenges to public health, wildlife conservation, and livestock production. Their own welfare may also be a concern, as free-roaming dogs can experience poor health and welfare. Dog population management is widely conducted to mitigate these issues. To ensure efficient use of resources, it is critical tha...

Frustration is a negative emotional state implicated in a range of canine behaviour problems. The Canine Frustration Questionnaire (CFQ) is the first psychometric tool developed to assess frustration tendencies in dogs based on owner report. However, to date, no published studies have assessed behavioural and physiological correlates of this trait....

The future of the meat industry will require the management of important trade-offs between economic, environmental and health aspects of both humans and animals. Understanding the patterns and trends of meat expenditure and consumption is crucial for assessing the current resilience of the system and for economic, planning, health and environmenta...

In humans and rats, changes in mood and affect are known to occur during pregnancy, however it is unknown how gestation may influence mood in other non-human mammals. This study assessed changes in pigs’ judgment bias as a measure of affective state throughout gestation. Pigs were trained to complete a spatial judgement bias task with reference to...

Sustainable livestock production requires links between farm characteristics, animal performance and animal health to be recognised and understood. In the pig industry, respiratory disease is prevalent, and has negative health, welfare and economic consequences. We used national-level carcass inspection data from the Food Standards Agency to identi...

Overabundant, free-roaming dog populations are associated with risks to public health, livestock losses, wildlife conservation, and dog health and welfare. Dog population management is conducted to mitigate these issues. Assessing dog population management strategies is important to determine their effectiveness, efficiency, and long-term impact. I...

In commercial pig production, stressful events are common and can have detrimental impacts on the pig's health and welfare, as well as on the performance of the farm. Supplementary magnesium may reduce stress, and subsequent harmful and aggressive behaviors, that occur during stressful events, such as regrouping. However, reports on the efficacy of...

The global food system faces various endogeneous and exogeneous, biotic and abiotic risk factors, including a rising human population, higher population densities, price volatility and climate change. Quantitative models play an important role in understanding food systems' expected responses to shocks and stresses. Here, we present a stylised math...

Wild animals are used in scientific research in a wide variety of contexts both in situ and ex situ. Guidelines for best practice, where they exist, are not always clearly linked to animal welfare and may instead have their origins in practicality. This is complicated by a lack of clarity about indicators of welfare for wild animals, and to what ex...

Osteoarthritis is a common clinical and pathological end-point from a range of joint disorders, that ultimately lead to structural and functional decline of the joint with associated lameness and pain. Increasing understanding of the risk factors associated with osteoarthritis will assist in addressing the significant threat it poses to the welfare...

The prevalence of many diseases in pigs displays seasonal distributions. Despite growing concerns about the impacts of climate change, we do not yet have a good understanding of the role that weather factors play in explaining such seasonal patterns. In this study, national and county-level aggregated abattoir inspection data were assessed for Engl...

The worldwide population of domestic dogs is estimated at approximately 700 million, with around 75% classified as “free-roaming”. Where free-roaming dogs exist in high densities, there are significant implications for public health, animal welfare, and wildlife. Approaches to manage dog populations include culling, fertility control, and shelterin...

Poster for UFAW conference 2019 "Advancing animal welfare science: How do we get there? - Who is it good for?"

Background Evidence-based comparison of the disorder-specific welfare burdens of major canine conditions could better inform targeting of stakeholder resources, to maximise improvement of health-related welfare in UK dogs. Population-level disease related welfare impact offers a quantitative, welfare-centred framework for objective disorder priorit...

Introduction: Psychometric tools have been developed for the assessment of behavioral and affective traits in non-human animals. Frustration can be defined as an emotional reaction experienced after a given expectation is violated. Frustration is a negative emotional state and whilst it probably plays a key role in certain behavior problems in dogs...

Individual pig detection and tracking is an important requirement in many video-based pig monitoring applications. However, it still remains a challenging task in complex scenes, due to problems of light fluctuation, similar appearances of pigs, shape deformations, and occlusions. In order to tackle these problems, we propose a robust on-line multi...

Emotions are mental states occurring in response to external and internal stimuli and thus form an integral part of an animal’s behaviour. Emotions can be mapped in two dimensions based on their arousal and valence. Whilst good indicators of arousal exist, clear indicators of emotional valence, particularly positive valence, are still rare. However...

Individual pig detection and tracking is an important requirement in many video-based pig monitoring applications. However, it still remains a challenging task in complex scenes, due to problems of light fluctuation, similar appearances of pigs, shape deformations and occlusions. To tackle these problems, we propose a robust real time multiple pig...

Peste des petits ruminants (PPR) is a major disease of domestic and wild small ruminants across Africa and Asia. The development of effective decision-support tools for PPR control needs to include the development of models for defining improved disease control methods. Data from serological surveys in sheep, goats, cattle and buffaloes were used t...

For farmed species, good health and welfare is a win-win situation: both the animals and producers can benefit. In recent years, animal welfare scientists have embraced cognitive sciences to rise to the challenge of determining an animal's internal state in order to better understand its welfare needs and by extension, the needs of larger groups of...

There is increasing interest in developing abattoir-based measures of farm animal welfare. It is important to understand the extent to which these measures reflect lifetime welfare status. The study aim was to determine whether lesions acquired during different production stages remain visible on the carcass, and the degree to which carcass-based m...

What can carcass-based assessments tell us about the lifetime welfare status of pigs? 2018. Livestock Science (accepted) There is increasing interest in developing abattoir-based measures of farm animal welfare. It is important to understand the extent to which these measures reflect lifetime welfare status. The study aim was to determine whether...

Osteoarthritis is the most common joint disease diagnosed in veterinary medicine and poses considerable challenges to canine welfare. This study aimed to investigate prevalence, duration and risk factors of appendicular osteoarthritis in dogs under primary veterinary care in the UK. The VetCompassTMprogramme collects clinical data on dogs attending...

Osteoarthritis is the most common joint disease diagnosed in veterinary medicine and poses considerable challenges to canine welfare. This study aimed to investigate prevalence, duration and risk factors of appendicular osteoarthritis in dogs under primary veterinary care in the UK. The VetCompassTM programme collects clinical data on dogs attendin...

Background: Physiological measures indicative of the welfare status of animals during rearing could form part of an abattoir-based animal health and welfare assessment tool. A total of 66 pigs were used in this study, the aim of which was to assess how serum concentrations of haptoglobin (Hp) and C-reactive protein (CRP) (assessed in 51 pigs), and...

Investigations comparing the behaviour and welfare of animals in different environments have led to mixed and often conflicting results. These could arise from genuine differences in welfare, poor validity of indicators, low statistical power, publication bias, or inappropriate statistical analysis. Our aim was to investigate the effects of using f...

Interactions between health, behaviour and individual differences such as; mood, affect or personality have been studied more in humans than they have in non-human animals. In humans, links can be made between personality and the expression of health problems, and between personality, affect, coping, treatment and recovery success. Previous researc...

This study represents the initial part of an investigation into the potential for non-native, wild, free-living muntjac deer (Muntiacus reevesi) to carry viruses that could be a threat to livestock. A degenerate PCR assay was used to screen a range of tissues from muntjac deer culled in Northern Ireland for the presence of herpesviral nucleic acids...

Cognitive bias has become a popular way to access non-human animal mood, though inconsistent results have been found. In humans, mood and personality interact to determine cognitive bias, but to date, this has not been investigated in non-human animals. Here, we demonstrate for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, in a non-human animal, th...

File 1: Supporting slaughterhouse data, collected from broiler chickens at approved slaughterhouses in Great Britain. (Sheet a) Monthly time-series for 16 health and welfare conditions, spanning January 2003 - December 2013; (Sheet b) County-level data for 16 health and welfare conditions in broilers slaughtered between 01 Jan 2011 and 31 Dec 2013;...

Climate change impact assessment and adaptation research in agriculture has focused primarily on crop production, with less known about the potential impacts on livestock. We investigated how the prevalence of health and welfare conditions in broiler (meat) chickens changes with weather (temperature, rainfall, air frost) in a temperate climate. Cas...

Social interactions among individuals are often mediated through acoustic signals. If acoustic signals are consistent and related to an individual's personality, these consistent individual differences in signalling may be an important driver in social interactions. However, few studies in non-human mammals have investigated the relationship betwee...

Evaluating the use of aggression-related skin lesion scores as a welfare assessment tool in growing-finishing pigs G. A. Carroll1, L. A. Boyle2, A. Hanlon3, L. Collins4, K. Griffin5, D. Armstrong6 and N. E. O’ Connell1 1 Institute for Global Food Security, Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland Technology Centre, Malone Road, Belfast BT9 5HN...

There is increasing interest in developing abattoir-based measures of farm animal welfare. However, it is important to understand the extent to which these measures reflect lifetime welfare. The study aim was to determine the extent to which on-farm health and welfare issues were reflected in measures taken from the carcass. Data were collected fro...

Poster presented at the International Pig Welfare Conference (IPWC), Copenhagen, Denmark, 2015