Active walking in broiler chickens: a flagship for good welfare, a goal for smart farming and a practical starting point for automated welfare recognition

Marian Stamp Dawkins

doi:10.3389/fvets.2023.1345216

Active walking in broiler chickens: a flagship for good welfare, a goal for smart farming and a practical starting point for automated welfare recognition

Front Vet Sci. 2024 Jan 8:10:1345216. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2023.1345216. eCollection 2023.

Author

Marian Stamp Dawkins¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Abstract

Automated assessment of broiler chicken welfare poses particular problems due to the large numbers of birds involved and the variety of different welfare measures that have been proposed. Active (sustained, defect-free) walking is both a universally agreed measure of bird health and a behavior that can be recognized by existing technology. This makes active walking an ideal starting point for automated assessment of chicken welfare at both individual and flock level.

Keywords: broiler chickens; image processing; optical flow; smart farming; welfare assessment.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The author was recipient of a SMART Broiler grant, which is co-sponsored by FFAR (Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research) and McDonald’s. (Phase I grant ID:20272 Phase II grant ID:20520).