The Center for Food Animal Wellbeing sponsored the symposium “Enhancing their quality of life: Environmental enrichment for poultry”, hosted by the Poultry Extension Collaborative at the 2022 Poultry Science Association meeting in San Antonio, Texas.
This symposium focused on the benefits and challenges of providing poultry with a complex environment and the impact on welfare in terms of health, behavior, and emotional states. Consensus is growing that ensuring good animal welfare does not just entail avoidance of suffering, but also the inclusion of positive experiences. Enrichments and complex environments can be the key to ensuring those experiences the established benefits of those enrichments on poultry welfare and health, as well as the challenges with implementing enrichments, were discussed. This symposium provided valuable insights from both the scientific and industry perspective and covered four topics:
- Poultry preferences and affective states in relation to their environment
- Stimulating species-specific behavior through environmental enrichments
- Environmental enrichment and their relationship with indicators of welfare
- Enrichments in the industry: success stories and challenges
Speakers from around the world spoke to these four topics and the details of the speakers, their affiliations, and talk titles are below.
Playful poultry: what does it take and what does it mean?
Ruth Newberry, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Viken, Norway
A bird’s eye view: the importance of the laying hen’s experience in a successful enrichment program
Richard Blatchford, University of California, Davis, California, Davis
Environmental enrichment for broiler chickens – are there beneficial effects on welfare?
Ingrid de Jong, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, Netherlands
Stimulating and modifying broiler behavior by provision of biologically relevant environmental enrichment
Anja Riber, Aarhus University, Tjele, Denmark
What’s good for the chickens and the farmers
Michael Levengood, Perdue Farms, Salisbury, Maryland
Enrichments in the industry: success stories and challenges
Karen Christensen, Tyson Foods, Springdale, Arkansas
