A number of mutilating procedures, such as dehorning in cattle and goats and beak trimming in laying hens, are common in farm animal husbandry systems in an attempt to prevent or solve problems, such as injuries from horns or feather pecking. These procedures and other practices, such as early maternal separation, overcrowding, and barren housing conditions, raise concerns about animal welfare. Efforts to ensure or improve animal welfare involve adapting the animal to its environment, i.e., by selective breeding (e.g., by selecting “robust” animals) adapting the environment to the animal (e.g., by developing social housing systems in which aggressive encounters are reduced to a minimum), or both. We propose adapting the environment to the animals by improving management practices and housing conditions, and by abandoning mutilating procedures. This approach requires the active involvement of all stakeholders: veterinarians and animal scientists, the industrial farming sector, the food processing and supply chain, and consumers of animal-derived products. Although scientific evidence about the welfare effects of current practices in farming such as mutilating procedures, management practices, and housing conditions is steadily growing, the gain in knowledge needs a boost through more scientific research. Considering the huge number of animals whose welfare is affected, all possible effort must be made to improve their welfare as quickly as possible in order to ban welfare-compromising procedures and practices as soon as possible.

Feather pecking is a prominent issue in the commercial egg industry, associated with economic losses and welfare problems. A non-systematic literature search suggests that studies on feather pecking are predominantly concerned with applied research goals. That is to say, they aim to solve or diminish the effects of this problematic behavior by orienting towards practical approaches. The strong emphasis on this research approach has skewed our knowledge of the causes of feather pecking in relation to welfare. While the need for such research is high, there is an equivalent need for basic research that has not received corresponding effort. Also, current research predominantly focuses on the negative effects on the birds being pecked, whereas too little attention is given to the possible welfare problems of the peckers. We argue that more basic research is needed for obtaining comprehensive science-based knowledge of behavioral needs and abilities of hens, in particular with respect to behavioral problems that threaten their welfare.

The replicability of experimental results is considered a cornerstone of empirical research. However, the reproducibility of results from groups that have not undergone experimental manipulation - the standard against which comparisons in an experiment are made - has been almost entirely neglected in animal research. Our aim is to address this gap by exemplarily determining within-laboratory replicability using research in pigs, an increasingly popular large animal model species. Drawing on data from twelve independent porcine holeboard studies conducted in our laboratory, we examine the replicability of groups that were not subjected to experimental manipulation (typically the control group), eventually including groups on which the experimental treatments had no effect. These analyses were also performed on all eight studies involving the Terra x Finnish Landrace x Duroc pig breed, with all other breeds excluded to increase genetic uniformity. The holeboard is a complex spatial discrimination task in which an animal must learn to find food at four of sixteen possible locations (holes) arranged in a 4 x 4 matrix. The main variables measured are spatial working memory (WM), reference memory (RM) and the inter-visit interval (IVI), which serves as an index of motivation. All studies showed predominantly linear improvements in WM and learning rates across successive trial blocks. IVI showed greater variation across trialblocks, but this did not affect WM and RM learning, which are robust and replicable indices of spatial learning in pigs. Assessing replicability provides relevant information, such as whether behavioural and physiological traits in a model species are stably expressed and robust across studies. Including replicability research and publishing its results can stimulate the development and use of more replicable methods and workflows, thereby increasing scientific rigour. Provided the data are available and accessible, the next step should be to expand replicability studies to include those conducted in different laboratories.