Review: Quantifying animal feeding behaviour with a focus on pigs

Area of Science:

• Animal Behavior
• Animal Science
• Ethology

Background:

• Animal feeding behavior is crucial for understanding health, treatment effects, and illness prediction.
• Feeding behavior is influenced by numerous factors, making 'free' feeding a complex process.
• Accurate study of feeding behavior requires awareness of underlying control mechanisms and external influences.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review the essential steps for studying animal feeding behavior.
• To illustrate these steps using examples from group-housed pigs.
• To discuss measurement methods and data analysis techniques for feeding behavior research.

Main Methods:

• Review of existing literature on animal feeding behavior mechanisms and influences.
• Discussion of various measurement methods, including sensor technologies for different settings (lab, group-housed, on-farm).
• Analysis of data units (feeding visits, meals) and methods for meal determination, emphasizing satiety-based approaches.

Main Results:

• Feeding behavior is controlled by satiety but is highly sensitive to various influencing factors.
• Multiple measurement methods exist, yielding data on feeding visits, which are often clustered into meals.
• Current meal determination methods, especially recent satiety-based ones, require further validation from behavioral and uniformity perspectives.

Conclusions:

• Studying animal feeding behavior requires careful consideration of control mechanisms, measurement techniques, and data analysis units (visits vs. meals).
• The choice of analysis unit (meals, visits, etc.) depends on research goals, with meals suitable for short-term analysis but potentially less so for disease detection.
• Further research and validation are needed for robust meal determination methods to ensure accurate behavioral analysis and uniformity in studies.