Udderly important behaviours: The study of the behavioural needs of adult dairy cows across common intensive housing systems
Authors: Catherine Arpin and Rachel Vliet and Marjorie Cellier and Nadège Aigueperse and Marianne Villettaz Robichaud and Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo and Elsa Vasseur
Date: 2025-06-01
Status: Published
Behavioural needs represent behaviours that animals perform no matter the environment or their physiological state. If these needs are not met, the welfare of the animals has the potential to be compromised. Characterizing the behavioural needs of farm animals is pivotal in understanding how to satisfy them by for example modifying their captive environment. However, behavioural needs are not well understood, and both their definition and application are inconsistent across the literature, particularly in the case of dairy cows. The objectives of this review are to identify papers that study behavioural needs of dairy cows, identify which needs were studied, how they were studied, and how that changed over time. A scoping review (conducted according to PRISMA guidelines) was completed, where 11,512 articles were reduced to 144 through a multi-step screening process. The included papers were published between 1946 and 2024 mostly in Canada (15%), in the United States (14%) and in the UK (11%). Of the remaining articles, only 15% acknowledged the existence of behavioural needs, and there was a lack of consistency in the terms used surrounding this concept. Resting and feeding behaviours were the most studied (in 122 and 86 papers, respectively), as opposed to grooming and exploratory behaviours that were only studied in 16 and 9 studies, respectively. By examining the timeline of when different behavioural categories were studied, it was revealed that the study of behavioural needs in adult dairy cows has evolved greatly in time and was guided by the priorities and the tools available at the time. This review summarises where the concept of behavioural needs fits within the study of dairy cows and highlights the gaps in the literature observed in the past and the present. It is imperative that these concepts be better understood and defined in the literature for the study of dairy cow welfare to move forward.