Research by Coleman et al. (1999) has shown that in the pig industry, not only is there a direct relationship between stockperson attitudes and behaviour and pig productivity, but also that there is relatively high staff turnover with 48% of stockpeople exiting within 6 months of recruitment. Anecdotal reports suggest that most managers of Australian pig farms tend to select staff based on intuitive and subjective measures. These usually take the form of personal recommendations, interviews (sometimes by telephone due to long distances) and curriculum vitae (CV). In particularly remote parts of Australia, employment may be given to itinerant workers with no formal CV, relevant experience or referees. In this situation the piggery manager has little to base his or her judgment on except “gut feelings” and hunches. A similar situation appears to exist in the poultry industries.

The potential value of selecting stockpeople using screening aids in the poultry industries is illustrated by a recent study in the Australian pig industry. One hundred and forty-four inexperienced stockpeople completed a series of computerised job-related questionnaires (Coleman, 2001, Carless et al, 2007). Inexperienced stockpeople were those who had been recruited to the piggery within the previous 4 weeks. After 6 months of employment, stockpeople were re-assessed by the supervisor and by an independent observer. A positive attitude towards the characteristics of pigs was a significant predictor of positive behaviour towards pigs and technical skills and knowledge, but not of work motivation and commitment. This suggests that attitude towards pigs is a good predictor of performance relating specifically to working with pigs, but not to general work motivation and commitment. This is an important result because our previous work (Hemsworth and Coleman, 1998) showed that only attitudes towards interacting with pigs are good predictors of behaviour. When the definition of behaviour is broadened, as in this more recent study, more general attitudes appear to be better predictors. Another significant finding was that a pre-employment measure of potential performance called the PDI-Performance measure was found to be a good predictor of all measures of actual observed performance. A person scoring high on this measure is likely to adhere to rules, show stability of behaviour, take care while performing tasks and take responsibility. The results from this study suggest that this measure may be a useful tool to help select stockpeople who will perform well in the ways studied here. The other main finding was that women appear to perform better on the basis of observations than do males. While this is a consistent result for these data, care needs to be taken that there are not other confounding factors. Females represented only 19% of the stockpeople in both the experienced and inexperienced groups. They may, therefore, have been a self-selected group, that is, a group who actively chose to enter the industry rather than doing so out of necessity. However the evidence obtained here is the first empirical support for the intuitively plausible assumption that women may be more nurturing and conscientious and therefore perform better in a commercial piggery.

It is reasonable to expect that similar predictors of stockperson performance would be obtained in other livestock industries including the poultry industries. There is considerable generality in the attitude–behaviour relationships observed in the dairy, pig and poultry industries, so it might be expected that similar generalities may apply for stockperson selection and training. Selection procedures do provide an opportunity not only to select stockpeople but to provide targeted training for both experienced and inexperienced stockpeople using selection tools as screening aids.

Human–animal interactions has been the topic of this chapter because there is an increasing body of evidence, currently not recognised widely in agriculture, that suggests that these interactions may result in profound behavioural and physiological changes in the animal, with consequences for the animal’s welfare. Our understanding of human–animal interactions in the poultry industries is relatively poor, however limited research on poultry together with studies in other livestock industries demonstrate the implications of human–animal interactions for poultry welfare. Research on the interactions between humans and farm animals has shown interrelationships between the stockperson’s attitudes and behaviour and fear, productivity and welfare of farm animals. The mechanism whereby fear affects welfare (and productivity) appears to be through a stress response. The risk to welfare also arises in situations in which the attitude and behaviour of the stockperson towards the animals are negative because the stockperson’s commitment to the surveillance of, and the attendance to, welfare issues is most likely highly questionable. Furthermore, these interactions may also influence the stockperson to the extent that job-related characteristics, such as job satisfaction, motivation and commitment, may be affected, with implications for the job performance and career prospects of the stockperson.

The sequential relationships between human and animal variables indicate that there is an opportunity to target stockperson attitudes and behaviour in order to improve poultry welfare. Stockperson selection and training programs addressing these key attitudinal and behavioural profiles appear to offer the poultry industries potential to improve poultry welfare. Understanding stockperson behaviour appears to be the key to manipulating these human–animal interactions to improve poultry welfare. Research is clearly required along these lines if the poultry industries are to minimise the limitations that human–animal interactions impose on poultry welfare.