News
Cum laude PhD degree awarded to Jacinta Bus
On the 3rd of July, Dr Jacinta Bus from the Animal Production Systems group achieved an extraordinary milestone by successfully defending her PhD thesis with the highest distinction, cum laude, at Wageningen University. Her thesis entitled "Drawing pig feeding patterns – Sensor-driven algorithms for individual welfare monitoring" explores the use of sensor technology for animal welfare monitoring in pigs.
The examination committee decided to award Jacinta the degree of Doctor with a Cum laude designation, due to the excellent defence and the exceptional quality of her thesis. She was supervised by her promotor Dr Eddie Bokkers and co-promotors Dr Iris Boumans and Dr Laura Webb.
Jacinta found that basal feeding patterns largely differed between individual pigs and over time. She identified four dimensions of diurnal feeding strategies in pigs: nibbling/meal eating, fast/slow eating, day/day-night eating and consistent/inconsistent eating from day to day. These differences in strategies were relatively consistent throughout the growing-finishing phase and were related to the general activity of pigs.
Behavioural responses of pigs to animal welfare issues were found to be highly inconsistent, ranging from increasing to decreasing feeding activity. Except for heat stress, where pigs showed consistently reduced feeding activity. For lameness and tail damage, only pigs with particular feeding strategies showed consistent patterns. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that higher ammonia concentrations in a pen co-occurred with higher levels of undesirable behaviours, such as aggression and tail biting. Meanwhile, she also took the opportunity to validate a 3D camera for measuring body weight and to critically analyse and discuss the (in)correct use of applying meal criterion methods for aggregating visits into meals.
ClearFarm project
The research was conducted as part of the European project ClearFarm, which aimed to use precision livestock farming technology and integrate animal-based and environmental data to improve animal welfare across the entire production chain.
Jacinta’s work focussed on the use of electronic feeding stations to measure feeding visits and feed intake, but also included other sensors, such as 3D cameras to measure body weight and climate sensors to measure environmental conditions. It presents a combination of in-depth ethological research, complex data analysis and innovative statistical methods and provides essential and fundamental building blocks required to understand behavioural patterns of individual pigs, both in undisturbed conditions and during welfare issues.
