The Role of Play in Animal Welfare

A tiger plays at a zoo.

Source: Petr Hamerník, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How do you ask an animal if it is in pain? It can be challenging, since many species have evolved to hide potential vulnerability.

At the University of Bristol, doctoral student Amelia St John Wallis is studying how play behaviors—including locomotor play, social play, and object play—can provide hints to how an animal feels. The research is informed by St John Wallis’ background in human psychology and affective disorders.

“Part of my inspiration was to bring principles and knowledge from human positive psychology and mental health research and apply them to the welfare of captive animals,” she says.

In a recent study, St John Wallis and colleagues observed play in dairy calves before and after horn disbudding. This is a common husbandry procedure used on commercial dairy farms to prevent horn growth. It is also potentially painful for days afterwards.

Calves play in different ways, such as running around and play-fighting. After disbudding, play-fighting ceased for a week. Since calves play-fight by pushing their heads against each other, and the disbudding injury is on the head, avoidance of this activity suggests that calves are in pain or fearful of more pain to their heads following the procedure.

However, disbudding did not have the same effect on all types of play. Most of the calves ran around more on the day after disbudding than they did before. This could be to make up for the lost play-fighting or to cope with stress—or it could suggest that locomotor play is highly motivated and less sensitive to changes in affective state than other forms of play.

Play fighting in cattle.

Source: Garry Knight, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

“I find it really interesting how the different kinds of play might be differentially motivated and reflect distinct things about animals’ experiences,” says St John Wallis. “It shows that play is complex and multifaceted.”

Play Enhances Animals’ Lives

Play is not just an indicator of animal welfare. It is also an important contributor to animal welfare.

In another recent paper, St John Wallis and colleagues reviewed one pathway through which play may enhance welfare: the development of flexibility and resilience.

“The idea is that flexibility helps you to adapt and manage in the face of changes or challenges,” says St John Wallis. “There is strong evidence for this in humans, where people with more flexibility tend to be more resilient.”

St John Wallis and colleagues incorporated different theories of play to create a model of the relationships between play, flexibility, resilience, and welfare. This included the “training for the unexpected” theory, which offers an evolutionary perspective by suggesting that play is useful for learning about different behaviors and how to behave flexibly across situations. The researchers were also inspired by the “broaden-and-build” theory of positive emotions in humans, which suggests that positive experiences like play help broaden minds and build resilience. A third arm of the model focused on how those positive emotions may build a more positive cognitive bias, which then alters how one interacts with the environment.

Play in a bird.

Source: Richard, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

“The model suggests that if an animal in a captive environment is more resilient, it will respond less negatively or recover more quickly from the inevitable challenges it will encounter, and its emotional state and its welfare will be better in response to those challenges,” says St John Wallis.

The implication of the model, which is supported by some research, is that play as an enrichment activity has the potential to improve the long-term welfare of animals in captivity.

Increasing play opportunities for captive animals may mean providing them with play objects, appropriate social partners, and adequate space, among other concerns. Play behavior has been well studied in certain captive animals, including laboratory rats and some agricultural species like cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens. But play may be just as important to other, less common captive species.

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“There is a lot we don’t know about what play looks like in birds, fish, and octopuses, and how to elicit it,” says St John Wallis.

“It would be interesting to look at how we can redesign captive systems to enable play and playfulness throughout an animal’s life, and how those changes might impact welfare.”