Remote monitoring for wellbeing in grazing sheep: are social behaviours useful?

The increase in the use of electronic identification ear tags means that production traits specific to an individual sheep can be recorded and that presence, and possibly wellbeing, of individual sheep may be able to be monitored remotely. If data from monitoring systems is to be used to identify wellbeing status of individual sheep then behavioural measures recorded need to stable in a group of healthy individuals, have a short lag time and, where possible, reflect a variety of welfare and health issues. To date roll call, movement order and social networks have been assessed as potential measures of wellbeing. These measures are not ideal as identifiers of change in welfare state of grazing sheep as they do not meet the time frame or stability and repeatability requirements. Further work on a variety of other measures is underway using additional technologies such as temperature sensing microchips and video image analysis.