Developed model for easier animal welfare assessment- with examples from dairy cows in loose housing Animals in captivity are completely dependent on human care. If captive animals are prevented from exhibiting their natural behavior, they may suffer. Animal welfare inspectors, who insure that the animal welfare legislation is followed, use a checklist to assess the situation in the husbandry. This checklist contains only two levels of assessment, which may result in a lack of detail in the assessment of the husbandry. The objective of this report was to develop a more detailed model that provides an overview of the situation in husbandry. The developed model was customized for dairy cows in loose housing with information from the animal welfare legislation, scientific results and advice from experts, and was then tested in four husbandries for dairy cows. The model was divided into five categories for which the assessment parameters were adapted. A rating scale with different colors and scores was developed to assess different qualities of husbandries and a control help text was made to facilitate the assessment. To illustrate the results they were placed in a pie chart. The major conclusion of this report is that a model like this works very well when the details of animal husbandry shall be shown. Besides that, a rating scale with more levels than those in the current checklist is necessary to develop an accurate overview of animal husbandries. A model like this can help the animal welfare inspectors to distinguish different types of animal keepers and thus optimize inspection procedures.

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<p>Environmental stress has shown to affect both the exposed individuals and the development of their offspring. Generally, it is thought that the stressed organism responds to stress by trying to adapt to it. This thesis investigates possible evolutionary consequences of cross-generational transmissions of stress, where the parent has been stressed but the offspring has not. In two studies we have exposed chicken parents of different breeds to an unpredictable circadian light rhythm, to investigate the influence of genetic background on the transmission of behaviour and patterns of genome-wide gene expression across generations. In Paper I, we can show that the domesticated chicken, by means of epigenetic factors, transmit their behaviours as well as their gene expression profiles to their offspring to a higher extent than their wild ancestor, the red junglefowl. Furthermore, in Paper II, even though the offspring never experienced the stress or had any contact with their stressed parents, they seemed to have adapted to it, which suggests that the parents might have prepared (or pre-adapted) them for living in the unpredictable environment. Additionally, eggs of stressed hens showed increased levels of estradiol that might have affected gene expression of specific immune genes, which were up-regulated in the offspring of stressed parents. It is possible that the traditional distinction between stress responses and evolutionary adaptation may be reevaluated, since our results indicate that they could be parts of the same evolutionary event.</p>