With the rise in awareness of animal sentience, consideration of an animal’s emotional state is now deemed an integral part of the welfare assessment (Mellor and Beausoleil, 2015). In the farming industries, the use of environmental enrichment is a common method to improve the welfare of domestic animals. Environmental enrichment can be defined as the provision of stimuli that creates opportunities for an animal to express a range of species-typical behaviour which are considered natural (or more important) to them, resulting in an improvement of biological functioning (Newbury, 1995). This enrichment can be presented to the animal through visual, auditory (sound), olfactory (smell/taste) and tactile means (Adeniji, 2012).
Often, the efficacy of current enrichment is measured by the reduction of unwanted and ‘inappropriate’ behaviours (Orihuela et al., 2019). Though, a reduction of unwanted behaviour does not necessarily correlate to good welfare nor a positive emotional state (Boissy et al., 2007). What exactly constitutes ‘good’ welfare and ‘effective enrichment’ is up for discussion, and these concepts are the products of an ongoing social debate among researchers, industries and the public (Schütz et al., 2020). The creation and enhancement of a positive emotional state are often not considered a primary objective for developing enrichment, and to date, there have been few studies which have explored how enrichment could provide opportunities for facilitating a positive emotional state alongside improved biological functioning (Lippi et al., 2022). The study of positive emotion in animals has long been neglected, and most of what we know is related to negative aspects such as pain and suffering (de Vera and Kuczaj, 2016). Instead of using enrichment as an opportunity to reduce unwanted behaviours, furthering the understanding of how a positive emotional state is expressed, and how enrichment can facilitate this, may provide a basis for developing enrichment which works to improve both biological functioning and emotional state.
The use of music as an enrichment has received a growing interest in recent years (Alworth and Buerkle, 2013), although it has long been overlooked as an effective method due to its lack of biological relevance (Newberry, 1995). Though in humans, the original intended consumer, music is effective in promoting social cohesion (Nikolsky. and Benítez-Burraco, 2022), reducing experiences of stress (Collingwood, 2016), and even creating desired behavioural responses to match a setting (North et al., 2009). If these same psychological and physiological effects of music listening were able to be experienced by animals, music could be considered an extremely effective enrichment.
This dissertation provides a brief summary of the current general discourse around animal welfare and enrichment provisions for captive and domestic animals, with a focus on the domestic pig (sus domesticus). Though not exhaustive, it highlights the reasoning behind some of the key shortcomings of various enrichments in relation to their suitability and role in the enhancement of welfare. There follows a short study analysing suggested behavioural indicators of positive emotion in pigs alongside a discussion of results and suggestions for how this could be used to develop biologically relevant musical enrichment. This dissertation concludes with some thoughts for measuring the success of musical enrichment, and what the future of music as an auditory enrichment may look like.
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