ANBI 411

• Behavioural Tests

  • 1) Response to environmental challenge
  • 2) Aggression
  • 3) General fearfulness
  • 4) Fearfulness towards humans
• Resident-intruder test


  1. Tests conducted in home pen

  2. Encounters between a 'resident' and 'intruder'

  3. Intruder is unfamiliar, smaller

  4. After the initial attack, the test is over
• Attack latency

  • Short latency: high aggressive
  • Long latency: low aggressive
• Grouping Active and Passive pigs

  • High resistant (active), five or more escape attempts
  • Low resistant (passive), two or less escape attempts
• Aggression at Mixing

  • Least aggression when passive dominant
  • Greatest aggression when active dominant
• Open-field test

  • Frequency of defecation
  • Animal's movements (ambulation score)
  • Position scores
• Tonic Immobility


  • Freeze response
  • Fearful birds: longer to move, less active, fewer distress calls
• Approach tests


  Measure fearfulness towards humans
• Both breed and type of work affected behaviour in horses
• Breed and work type affected

  Emotionality & Learning in horses
• Model of dog personality

  • 5 factors: Playful, Curiosity, Chase, Social, Aggress
  • Similarity across breeds suggests basic personality traits have been conserved in dogs
• There are four key canine motivations: Play-drive, Hunt-drive, Prey-drive, Pack-drive
• Breed differences in temperament

  B. indicus crosses had higher scores than B. taurus
• Sex differences in temperament

  Heifers had higher scores than steers
• Calmer cattle


  Had higher average daily gains (~10%)
• Cattle are calmer now than previously, possibly due to genetic change or management
• If personality is consistent over time, does that mean it is maladaptive?
• Plasticity in Personality - Trout

  1. Evaluated in a Novel Object Test

  2. Observing other fish

  3. Winners and Losers
• Shy fish became bolder

  Regardless of treatment
• Different results on individual differences in pigs depending on the study
• Animal personality is a new & growing field
• Understanding individual differences can help in daily management, improve our understanding of behaviour & learning, and improve science by reducing variation (false negatives)
• Behavioural traits are influenced (and can be modified) by genetics and management
• Animal Behaviour


  How an animal reacts to stimuli in the environment or physiological change
• Social behaviour

  Forming co-operative and interdependent relationships
• Ethology


  The scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, its causation and function, especially under natural conditions
• Applied Ethology

  Behaviour of domestic animals
• Nikolaas Tinberg's 4 questions to define animal ethology

  • Function: what function does the trait have to keep the species alive. "Why does the trait happen?"
  • Development: how has the trait developed(ontogeny)
  • Evolution: what is the history of the trait? (Phylogeny)
  • Mechanism: how does the trait work? (causation). "How does it develop"
• Animal machine was a book written by Ruth Harrison in the 1960s the brought animal ethology and welfare into awareness
• Researchers in animal behaviour

  • Konrad Lorenz: geese imprinting, or attachment behaviours
  • Karl Von Frisch: bees waggle dance to tell each other where to find food sources
• Domestication


  Relationship with man, animals adapting to live with humans, and humans providing for animals
• Domestication is NOT the same thing as taming
• Majority of genetic selection occurred before domestication due to natural selection
• What led to domestication

  • Environmental changes
• How humans had control over animals in the beginning

  • Herding, culling, castration, tying, hobbles
  • The impact of genetic selection of these was removal of the more aggressive animals
  • Docility is the most important behaviour factor in domestication
• Factors that were likely "selected" for the ability to control animals such as herding ability, temperament, and aggression
• In the last 100 years, there has been a shift in how genetic selection takes place, such as particular matings, computers and artificial insemination and semen collection
• Genetic fitness


  Animals' ability to survive and reproduce in a population
• It is possible that by focusing on a specific production trait, we will move animals away from domestication by introducing wild genes back into a population, letting natural selection play a role, and prioritizing different traits like foraging ability or better immune systems
• Genotype


  Genetic makeup of an individual