Natural Behaviour Is Not Enough: Farm Animal Welfare Needs Modern Answers to Tinbergen’s Four Questions

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The term ‘natural behaviour’ is widely used by food companies to advertise their animal welfare credentials but the public needs to be made aware that there is no necessary connecton between naturalness and good welfare. Some natural behaviour contributes to good welfare but others, such as being chased and caught by a predator, does not. Used on its own without supporting evidence, ‘natural behaviour’ lacks the most essential criterion for good welfare—whether it matters to the animals themselves. There are now tried and tested methods for establishing what animals value ranging from simple choice tests to what they find rewarding in learning tasks and are prepared to work to obtain. In addition, the growth of animal behaviour studies over the last 60 years has yielded a wealth of new information about what animals respond to, what motivates them, how their behaviour develops during their lifetimes and how the behaviour of modern farm animals differs from that of their wild ancestors. By using all this information as well as just relying on the shaky concept of ‘natural behaviour’, there are thus now opportunities for improving farm animal welfare that are both more evidence-based and more animal-centred. ABSTRACT: Despite the many scientific objections that have been raise to it, ‘natural behaviour’ is widely used as an indication of good welfare by the food industry. The supposed link between welfare and natural behaviour derives, however, from a now outdated view of animals becoming frustrated if they cannot perform their natural instinctive behaviour. On the 60th anniversary of its publication, Niko Tinbergens’ Four Questions framework is used to show why there is no necessary link between natural behaviour and welfare and why, therefore, reliance on natural behaviour in commercial farming may not result in the claimed improvements in welfare. Used on its own without supporting evidence, ‘natural behaviour’ lacks the most essential criterion for good welfare—whether it matters to the animals themselves. There are now a number of well-established methods for demonstrating what animals value, including choice tests and, particularly, what animals will work and pay a cost to obtain. Some of the evidence on what animals value is already available in published papers but some will require collaborative research between scientists and commercial farming to find practical and commercially viable ways of providing animals with what they value.