Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Human-animal relationships are a common feature of modern animal production and can be expressed in many different ways. These relationships are developed through daily interactions between the two parties and are shown through their respective behaviors. For example acoustic interactions are common for stockpeople to use when it comes to the daily handling and interaction with pigs. Other interactions that occur on a daily basis are visual, chemical and physical interactions. However, how these interactions take place depends a lot on the stockperson’s attitude towards the animals. This is because their attitude towards animals form the basis of their behavior towards them. Because of this, it is of great importance to understand what motivates stockpeople to choose a certain behavior when they are interacting with pigs. There are many occasions in pig production where humans and animals interact and each interaction can have a strong impact on the pigs. If these interactions are poor, there is for instance an increased risk that animals will develop a fear of humans, and there is also a risk of reduced welfare, productivity and health. How stockpeople choose to interact with and handle the animals is thus crucial for the pigs to not perceive the handling as aversive. Apart from this, human-animal relationships are also of great importance for the stockpeople. This is because the human-animal relationship affects pigs’ behavior and thus how easy they are to handle. For example, pigs’ fear of humans is often associated with the fact that handling the animals becomes more difficult, as they will want to avoid human contact. Because of this, knowledge of human-animal relationships are important for understanding and influencing these relationships, but it is also important from the point of view of improving the understanding of the relationship between stockpeople’s attitudes, behaviors and other factors, including the influence of the work environment. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate stockpeople’s attitudes towards pigs, describe how pigs can be affected by this and investigate the stockpeople’s working conditions. The data for this study was collected through a questionnaire, which was shared online, through an email send list and published in a newsletter on Gård- och djurhälsan. Even though there was a smaller sample size collected in this study, the results still indicated that stockpeople’s attitudes towards pigs are positive. Furthermore, the results also showed that the stockpeople believe that their handling methods affect the pigs’ welfare and that the working environment plays an important role in achieving human-animal relationships in today’s pig production. To be able to achieve positive human-animal relationships improvements should therefore be made to stockpeople’s work environment.