Developmental Programming, Evolution, and Animal Welfare: A Case for Evolutionary Veterinary Science

ABSTRACT

The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) that serve to match offspring phenotype with predicted future environmental conditions. When these predictions fail, a mismatch occurs between offspring phenotype and the environment, which can have long-lasting health and welfare effects. Examples include metabolic diseases resulting from maternal nutrition and behavioral changes from maternal stress. An understanding of these processes and their evolutionary origins will help in identifying and providing appropriate developmental conditions to optimize offspring welfare. This serves as an example of the benefits of using evolutionary thinking within veterinary science and we suggest that in the same way that evolutionary medicine has helped our understanding of human health, the implementation of evolutionary veterinary science (EvoVetSci) could be a useful way forward for research in animal health and welfare.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmental programming
• animal nutrition
• predictive adaptive response
• animal health
• animal welfare
• evolutionary medicine
• maternal nutrition

Acknowledgements

We thank several authors for feedback on an early version of our manuscript, especially John Matthewson, Tatjana Buklijas, and Edmund LeGrand.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Though there is evidence that an individual’s full size as an adult, despite catch-up growth, is still smaller than they would have otherwise been (Schinckel & Short, 1961).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Laureate Fellowship project “A Philosophy of Medicine for the 21st Century” [[Ref: FL170100160]]; European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [851145].