Julie M Collet, Claire Bonnefous, Karine Germain, Laure Ravon, Ludovic Calandreau, Vanessa Guesdon, Anne Collin, Elisabeth Le Bihan-Duval, Sandrine Mignon-Grasteau
A key characteristic of free-range chicken farming is to enable chickens to spend time outdoors. However, each chicken may use the available areas for roaming in variable ways. To check if, and how, broilers use their outdoor range at an individual level, we need to reliably characterise range use behaviour. Traditional methods relying on visual scans require significant time investment and only provide discontinuous information. Passive RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) systems enable tracking individually tagged chickens' when they go through pop-holes; hence, they only provide partial information on the movements of individual chickens...
February 1, 2024: Animal