Alternative housing systems have mixed impacts on health and welfare of laying hens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Canadian egg farmers are transitioning from conventional cages to alternative housing systems, it is important to evaluate the impact of these on the health and welfare of laying hens. A total of 11 commercial enriched colonies (EC) and 11 commercial aviaries (A) houses from Quebec, Canada, were visited monthly between 19 and 35 weeks of age then every 10 weeks until 65 weeks of age. Each visit, 12 birds were randomly selected to be individually examined and scored for health and welfare indicators either visually (footpad dermatitis (FPD), feather damage and feather cleanliness) or by palpation (keel bone deviation (KBD) keel bone fracture (KBF), wing fracture, laying status and body condition) to determine the impact of housing and age on these parameters. Hens housed in A had a significantly higher predicted probability of KBF (P = 0.038) and FPD (P = 0.016). Although no difference was observed in the predicted probabilities of overall feather damage between housing systems (P = 0.82), the predicted probabilities of feather damage in the cloacal region was higher for birds housed in EC (P = 0.017). Other measured parameters were not influenced by housing types when all ages were combined. Significant increases for predicted probability compared to the baseline age for keel deviation (P < 0.004), damaged feather coverage (P < 0.0001), feather uncleanliness (P < 0.003) and laying status (laying or not) (P < 0.0001) were observed for both systems. Surprisingly, no difference for KBF overtime was observed for either housing system (P > 0.03, non-significant after the alpha-level adjustment). Higher predicted probability in A for FPD compared to the baseline was observed for all-time points assessed (P < 0.0001). Overall, A negatively affected the predicted probabilities of KBF and FPD. Development overtime of most health and welfare indicators should be taken into consideration when extending the laying production cycle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".