PSIII-19 Identification of important behaviors and postures to indicate respiratory distress in pigs.

Abstract Respiratory illness is a prevalent issue in pork production systems, resulting in economic losses each year. Behavioral analysis may detect early onset of respiratory illness in breeding herds, increasing the overall health and welfare of the animals. The objective of this study was to determine if respiratory distress could be characterized by behavior and posture differences for use as a tool to identify emerging subclinical respiratory illness in late-gestation pigs. In this study, a cohort of 10 gestational sows were housed in individual stalls, fed a diet of corn-soybean meal, and provided ad libitum access to water. Animals were randomly split between two main treatment groups: a control group (10 μg phosphate buffered saline/kg BW) and immune challenge group (10 μg lipopolysaccharide (LPS)/kg BW). Treatment was administered intravenously (jugular venipuncture) on gestational day 70. The pigs were recorded continuously using video monitoring. Three unexpected mortalities were observed. Necropsy performed by veterinary staff determined the mortalities resulted from an undetected subclinical respiratory illness. An ethogram containing 27 behavior and posture labels was created to study the activity of the sows. Behavioral Observation Research Interactive Software, or BORIS, was used to analyze the time frames 24-hour hours pre-LPS injection; and 0.5-, 1.5-, and 2-hours post-LPS injection. The analysis was split into 3 treatment groups: control, LPS+Recover, and LPS+Death. A statistical analysis was performed to compare the behavior data between each treatment group. Normal and transformed data was analyzed using an ANOVA comparison, and non-normal data was analyzed using a Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test. Differences in feeding (P=0.0131), drinking (P=0.0218), sham chewing (P=0.0131), and head shaking (P=0.011) behaviors were found between the control group and both LPS treatment groups for both average bout length and total number of occurrences. Each of these behaviors occurred less within the LPS+Recover and LPS+Death groups with all four behaviors occurring less for LPS groups. These results may indicate that these behaviors may be useful to monitor as sentinel behaviors for health status changes and early detection of infections and/or disease. In the video, some sows demonstrated convulsive-like behaviors, which have not been studied extensively before in previous literature. Further analysis is needed to determine its impact on sickness behavior, specifically respiratory distress. Results from this study may be useful in behavior classifications of gestational sows responding to LPS treatments and for animal health monitoring.