Version 1
: Received: 14 January 2020 / Approved: 17 January 2020 / Online: 17 January 2020 (12:37:53 CET)
How to cite:
Jiang, S.; Hu, J.; Cheng, H. The Bacteria-gut-brain Axis: Gut Bacteria as a Key Regulator of Social Stress and Stress-related Injurious Behaviors in Chickens. Preprints2020, 2020010193
Jiang, S.; Hu, J.; Cheng, H. The Bacteria-gut-brain Axis: Gut Bacteria as a Key Regulator of Social Stress and Stress-related Injurious Behaviors in Chickens. Preprints 2020, 2020010193
Jiang, S.; Hu, J.; Cheng, H. The Bacteria-gut-brain Axis: Gut Bacteria as a Key Regulator of Social Stress and Stress-related Injurious Behaviors in Chickens. Preprints2020, 2020010193
APA Style
Jiang, S., Hu, J., & Cheng, H. (2020). The Bacteria-gut-brain Axis: Gut Bacteria as a Key Regulator of Social Stress and Stress-related Injurious Behaviors in Chickens. Preprints. https://doi.org/
Chicago/Turabian Style
Jiang, S., Jiaying Hu and Heng-wei Cheng. 2020 "The Bacteria-gut-brain Axis: Gut Bacteria as a Key Regulator of Social Stress and Stress-related Injurious Behaviors in Chickens" Preprints. https://doi.org/
Abstract
Some management practices, such as maintaining birds under high group density, used in the poultry industry may cause birds stress, leading to injurious behaviors, such as injurious pecking, aggression, and cannibalism. In addition, some management practices used to prevent severe injuries in birds may cause pain. Beak trimming (BT), removal of 1/3 to 1/2 of a beak, is a routine husbandry procedure practiced in laying hens to prevent or reduce injurious behaviors. However, BT causes tissue damage, which may increase somatosensory sensitization of the damaged nerve tissues, resulting in pain (acute, chronic or both) in the treated birds because the beak is a complex, functional organ with an extensive nerve supply. BT has already been heavily regulated or prohibited in several European countries and, in time, this trend will impact the practice used in the United States poultry industry. With the growing public concern for poultry welfare there is a pressing need to identify and develop alternatives to BT. Probiotics defined “as a source of live (viable) naturally occurring microorganisms (direct-fed microbials)” have been used as dietary supplements or functional foods to target gut microbiota (microbiome) for prevention or therapeutic treatment of mental diseases including social stress-induced psychiatric disorders in humans and various experimental animals. In our studies, chickens were used as an animal model to assess if dietary supplementation of probiotic, Bacillus subtilis, reduces injurious behaviors following social challenge. Hens of Dekalb XL strain, an aggressive line, were used in the studies. Our results indicate that dietary supplementation of the Bacillus subtilis based probiotic reduces aggressive behaviors in chickens. These results suggest dietary probiotics could be a suitable strategy for increasing hosts’ health status and welfare conditions.
Keywords
laying hen; social stress; injurious behavior; microbiota; probiotic; bacillus subtilis
Subject
Social Sciences, Behavior Sciences
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
