Contrafreeloading (CFL) refers to animals’ tendency to prefer obtaining food through effort rather than accessing food that is freely available. Researchers have proposed various hypotheses to explain this intriguing phenomenon, but few studies have provided a comprehensive analysis of the factors influencing this behaviour. In this study, we observed the choice of alternative food containers in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) to investigate their CFL tendencies and the effects of pre-training, food deprivation, and effort required on the CFL tasks. The results showed that budgerigars did not exhibit significant difference in their first choices or the time interacting with less challenging versus more challenging food containers. Moreover, when evaluating each budgerigar’s CFL level, only half of them were identified as strong contrafreeloaders. Thus, we suggest that budgerigars exhibit an intermediate CFL level that lies somewhere between a strong tendency and the absence of such behaviour. Furthermore, we also found that food-deprived budgerigars tended to select less challenging food containers, and pre-trained budgerigars were more likely to choose highly challenging food containers than moderately challenging food containers, which means that the requirement of only a reasonable effort (access to food from moderately challenging food containers in this study) and the experience of pre-training act to enhance their CFL levels, whereas the requirement of greater effort and the experience of food deprivation act to decrease their CFL levels. Studying animal CFL can help understand why animals choose to expend effort to obtain food rather than accessing it for free, and it also has implications for setting feeding environments to enhance the animal welfare of captive and domesticated animals.

The governance of farm animal welfare is led, in certain countries and sectors, by industry organisations. The aim of this study was to analyse the legitimacy of industry-led farm animal welfare governance focusing on two examples: the Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Dairy Cattle and the Animal Care module of the proAction programme in Canada, and the Animal Care module of the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) programme in the United States (US). Both are dairy cattle welfare governance programmes led by industry actors who create the standards and audit farms for compliance. We described the normative legitimacy of these systems, based on an input, throughput, and output framework, by performing a document analysis on publicly available information from these organisations’ websites and found that the legitimacy of both systems was enhanced by their commitment to science, the presence of accountability systems to enforce standards, and wide participation by dairy farms. The Canadian system featured more balanced representation, and their standard development process uses a consensus-based model, which bolsters legitimacy compared to the US system. However, the US system was more transparent regarding audit outcomes than the Canadian system. Both systems face challenges to their legitimacy due to heavy industry representation and limited transparency as to how public feedback is addressed in the standards. These Canadian and US dairy industry standards illustrate strengths and weakness of industry-led farm animal welfare governance.

Pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) and most other farmed species are social animals for whom social isolation is known to cause stress. However, their social nature is commonly ignored in behavioural and cognitive tasks, on which they are trained and tested individually, which may impact their welfare and the validity of test results. We chose the Judgement Bias Task (JBT), a promising proxy measure of affective states, to compare training duration, task performance and behaviour of pigs trained and tested in social isolation (ISO; n = 12) with pigs trained and tested with physical and visual contact to social companions through an opening covered with wire mesh (SOC; n = 12). Eleven SOC pigs and eight ISO pigs learned the task, but SOC and ISO pigs did not differ in training duration or task performance when tested. However, ISO pigs showed a higher frequency of all behavioural measures indicative of stress, i.e. high-pitched vocalisation, freezing, exit-approaching behaviour, heavy escape attempts, defaecation and urination compared to SOC pigs. Future research should replicate our study, additionally in combination with other treatments like different housing conditions, to investigate potential interacting effects on learning and task performance. Several open questions remain, but the unambiguous behavioural differences we found strongly advocate for more research to decrease the stress and thus improve the welfare of pigs and other social animals used in behavioural and cognitive tasks.