From a welfare perspective it is essential to detect and limit pain. Apart from welfare issues, pain in dairy cattle is also causes economical losses due to decreased milk production, reduced fertility and early culling. Most animal workers can agree on when a cow is experiencing severe pain. However, there is a less mutual understanding when it comes to more subtle symptoms which may be due to a lack of a proper pain assessment. Prey animals, such as cattle, tend to hide signs of weakness, which may contribute to a delayed detection of animals in pain. The pain expression is dependent on several factors, such as animal species, type of disease, whether the pain is acute or chronical and individual aspects. To reach a reliable method for detecting and evaluating pain in cattle more knowledge about how cattle express pain during different circumstances are needed. Physiological parameters, such as heart rate, blood cortisol levels and respiratory rate, has readily been used for evaluation of pain. However, since these parameters can be affected by both stress and certain diseases,they are unreliable as a sole indicator for pain in animals.
The aim of this project is to validate whether pain related behaviours, including facial expressions, can be used to detect and monitor different painful conditions in cattle. Further, the aim is to develop a systematic method for identification and registration of different facial activities in cattle.
I also take part in different research projects involving biomechanics and objective gait analysis in cattle.
Main supervisor: Marie Rhodin
Assistant supervisors: Elin Hernlund (SLU), Jean-Francois Valarcher (SLU), Katrina Ask (SLU)
