Animal production was born when the human began to raise and breed some wild species as domestic animals. By breeding and improvement, the modern breeds of farm animals came to have a high productive ability specialized in each productive purpose. After the middle of the 20th century, intensified animal production system began to grow rapidly in developed countries. Then the distance with animals in their productive fields was gradually separated from consumers, and consumers came to contact only with the animal products exclusively. With the publication of Ruth Harrison's　“Animal Machines” in 1964, the inferior environmental conditions of intensified animal production system drew people’s concerns, and a movement for resolving animal welfare problems was got started. And, with the outbreak of BSE in 1986 and the transmission of the disease to humans by taking foods produced from infected animals, the safety security of food of animal origin became the social request. Furthermore, when entering the 21st century, zoonoses such as SARS in 2002, Novel influenza (swine-origin influenza A/H1N1) in 2009, MERS in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 infectious disease (COVID-19) in 2019 occurred successively. Close relations between the health of humans, the health of domestic animals, and the soundness of ecosystems have been recognized. And from a viewpoint of human-animal-ecosystem interactions, the thought of One Health Approach is gradually penetrating. In animal production today, welfare-based animal production is required from the standing points of not only solving animal welfare problems caused by their production field conditions and the undesirable side effects of breeding, but also, safety security of food of animal origin, and the prevention of zoonoses.

The present study aimed to determine the effects of cardboard beds on psychophysiological responses during night-time sleep. For this study, we included 16 healthy male participants who provided written informed consent. We established two experimental conditions: night-time sleep using cardboard beds and exercise mats. In both conditions, each participant ate dinner at 19:00, went to bed at 23:00, and woke up at 07:00. During night-time sleep in both conditions, we measured their heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP), cardiac autonomic nervous system modulation (ANS), wrist activity to estimate sleep/wake, and subjective soundness of sleep. The number of wake episodes for 1 minute or longer was significantly higher in the cardboard bed condition than in the exercise mat condition. Consequently, the degree of subjective soundness of sleep was significantly higher in the cardboard bed condition than in the exercise mat condition. However, there were no significant differences in the HR, BP, ln HF, sleep efficiency, and sleeping time between the two conditions. These data suggest that using cardboard beds can improve the quality of sleep.