Tina Widowski

Dr. Tina Widowski is an animal welfare scientist interested in how the housing and management of farm animals affects their welfare. With training in behaviour and physiology, she uses a variety of measures to try to understand how animals perceive and respond to the environments that we keep them in and to the ways that we handle them. She has studied diverse topics such as the endocrinology of nest building in sows, the behavioural responses of hens to different lighting systems, the ontogeny of feeding and drinking in piglets and motivation for dust bathing and nesting in laying hens. Her research group has tackled some difficult issues including transport and handling of market pigs and methods for euthanasia of piglets and poultry. Her goal is to determine how we can match agricultural systems to the animals’ behavioural biology in order to develop good practices for their care.