Front. Neurosci.

Sec. Neurogenesis

Volume 18 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1493605

Provisionally accepted

Katharina Maria Hillerer *

Ulrike Gimsa

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

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Welfare in commercial livestock farming is becoming increasingly important in current agriculture research. Unfortunately, there is a lack of understanding about the neuronal mechanisms that underlie well-being on an individual level. Neuroplasticity in the hippocampus, the subventricular zone (SVZ), the olfactory bulb (OB) and the hypothalamus may be essential regulatory components in the context of farm animal behaviour and welfare that may be altered by providing environmental enrichment (EE). The importance of pre-and probiotics as a form of EE and the microbiota-gut-brain-axis (MGBA) has come under the spotlight in the last 20 years, particularly in the contexts of research into stress and of stress resilience. However, it could also be an important regulatory system for animal welfare in livestock farming. This review aims to present a brief overview of the effects of EE on physiology and behaviour in farm animals and briefly discusses literature on behavioural flexibility, as well as inter-individual stress-coping styles and their relationship to animal welfare. Most importantly, we will summarise the literature on different forms of neural plasticity in farm animals, focusing on neurogenesis in various relevant brain regions. Furthermore, we will provide a brief outlook connecting these forms of neuroplasticity, stress, EE, the MGBA and welfare measures in modern livestock farming, concentrating on pigs. 2011, Romero et al., 2009) ) for review), and these adjustments are also dependent on individual coping styles ((de Boer et al., 2017) for review). Individual stress-coping abilities and variations in stress responsiveness are common phenomena, seen not only in laboratory animals ((

Keywords: farm animals, neuroplasticity, Animal Welfare, environmental enrichment, Microbiota-gut-brain axis, Stress coping

Received: 09 Sep 2024; Accepted: 05 Nov 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Hillerer and Gimsa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Katharina Maria Hillerer, Institute for Behavioural Physiology, Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), Dummerstorf, Germany

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