Reducing damaging behaviour in robust livestock farming

•The robustness strategy at the animal level aims at changes in social environment.•Breeding social animals improves productivity and welfare of group housed animals.•Breeding/keeping robust animals needs optimization of social/physical environment. This paper focuses on how farmers can reduce damaging behaviour in livestock farming by using robustness strategies. We suggest focusing not only on breeding and improvement of early life, but also on supporting adaptation to the environment by offering a suitable housing environment. First, we describe the theoretical background to robustness. Three different robustness strategies are then related to one external and two internal aspects of system vulnerability, namely, exposure, resistance and resilience. Subsequently, we investigate the extent to which robustness can contribute to the reduction of damaging behaviour.