Cheryl McCarthy

I. INTRODUCTIONBrooding chicks with maternal care can improve the welfare of chicks; specifically, by improving prosocial behavior and reducing feather pecking (Edgar et al., 2016). Yet providing chicks mother hens in industry is impractical and a biosecurity risk. Artificial components of maternal care may provide some benefits to chicks and improve welfare. Indeed, there is some evidence that li ...

Frequent visits to an outdoor range has been associated with good meat chicken welfare but not all chickens will access the outdoor range when provided with the opportunity (Taylor et al., 2018). On average, it takes an average of three to four days for most meat chickens in commercial conditions to access the range after the pop-holes first open (Taylor et al., 2017a). Yet chickens that access th ...

Quantification of range use in commercial meat chicken flocks is desirable so that farmers can objectively assess meaningful range access, including number of chickens using the range and how far chickens roam from the shed. Currently there is no cost-effective technology for quantifying range use in commercial conditions, and farm staff perform assessments based on visual inspection. A proof-of-c ...

There is some evidence that commercial meat chickens prefer to access the range through ‘favoured’ pop-holes (Taylor et al., 2017); however what makes pop-holes attractive or aversive is unknown. Therefore, we aimed to i) determine the most aversive stimuli associated with pop-holes and ii) identify the most effective artificial structure to minimise aversion.We hypothesised that the s ...