Animal welfare foremost to MSU professor

Midday update

By Matthew Miller
Lansing State Journal

EAST LANSING - Adroaldo Zanella's interest in animal welfare can be traced, loosely, to a pregnant sow and a 500-pound nest.

It was the mid-1980s. Zanella was doing research on his family's pig farm in Brazil, experimenting with outdoor enclosures that allowed pigs to express their natural behavior patterns.

One pig, the sow in question, was allowed outside to give birth. She began instead to gather branches and twigs - hundreds of pounds of branches and twigs - and built them into a gigantic nest. This, apparently, is what pigs do in the wild.

Zanella was intrigued, both by the display of instinctive behavior from an animal raised indoors and by the fact that his pigs seemed to flourish outdoors. He began to ask questions.

"If you, as a human or an animal, evolve with the brain machinery to perform a certain behavior, what are the consequences of depriving you of the opportunity to do it?" he said.

Zanella, who went on to do doctoral research in animal welfare, is now the head of Michigan State University's Animal Behavior and Welfare Group.

Asking questions about quality of life as it pertains to pigs - and to other animals - is the essence of his job. So is answering them, scientifically.