Showing papers in "Applied Animal Behaviour Science in 2011"

TL;DR: Local anaesthesia administered before disbudding or dehorning eliminates pain-related behaviour and reduces the plasma cortisol response for about 1.5 h, followed by a return to pretreatment values at 7–8 h.

TL;DR: Evidence is discussed which suggests that human contact meets some of the criteria that traditional methods of environmental enrichment aim to satisfy and which has important implications for the management of captive zoo-housed animals through the design of appropriate husbandry procedures.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined links between the way in which owners reported to have trained their dogs and observations of the dogs' subsequent behaviour. But they did not explore associations between behaviour of owner and dog when tested in their own home.

TL;DR: Relationships between handling and animal stress were studied in 200 animals and the direction of the relationships indicate that increased head down by sheep, increased dog use and fewer whistles, and fewer touches and pushes by stockpeople were associated with increased cortisol concentrations in sheep.

TL;DR: The scientific evidence for the rationale for tail docking, a description of the different methods used, the pain response to the procedure and the effectiveness of pain alleviation, and, finally, the alternatives to tail docking and policy regarding the practice are reviewed.

TL;DR: A test of cognitive (judgement) bias was used to measure whether a positive low arousal affective state could be induced in domestic dogs as a result of their experiencing a food-based rewarding event, and hypothesized that dogs tested after experiencing the rewarding event would be more likely to judge visually ambiguous stimuli positively, compared to dogs in the ‘Neutral’ treatment.

TL;DR: It is suggested that pain experienced in the udder overrides the motivational the state of the cows’ sickness behaviour and novel mastitis detection tools should be able to automatically detect and combine changes on both physiological parameters and complete behavioural patterns consisting of resting, standing and eating behaviours.

TL;DR: It is suggested that multimodal analgesic regimens that extend into the post-operative period are more effective at mitigating pain and distress associated with castration than a single drug modality.

TL;DR: It is concluded that pain caused by parturition in animals deserves more research in order to optimize the parturitions process and reduce its negative consequences on health, welfare and productivity.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors review the ways that attention is studied, the diversity of taxa in which this cognitive process has been studied, and how stimuli from one modality may interfere with attentional processes in another modality.

TL;DR: In this paper, the fourth principle of the Welfare Quality® project, labelled "Appropriate behaviour" was assessed on 21 farms (11 extensive and 10 intensive) with a total of 25,856 Iberian pigs (Sus scrofa).

TL;DR: Investigating the behaviour profiles of 98 breeds and the behavioural differences among conventional breed groups based on historical utility and among genetic breed clusters found that two of the behaviour traits significantly differed both among the conventional and the genetic breed groups.

TL;DR: Wallowing in pigs, like dustbathing in poultry, may be indicative of positive welfare and, perhaps, the performance of the behaviour is ‘hardwired’ and rewarding in itself and, if so, wallowing could be an important element of a good life in pigs.

TL;DR: Enrichment pre- and postweaning, as well as providing more possibilities to interact with the sow, can positively affect how piglet behaviour develops before weaning and how they adapt after weaning.

TL;DR: This paper investigated the effects of different environmental treatments and personality types on aggression at mixing of newly weaned domestic piglets, and found that personality had subtle and environment-dependent effects on fighting, and influenced the "structure" rather than the amount of aggressive behaviour.

TL;DR: This study investigated the association between tail biting (TB) and other abnormal behaviours in a group of non-tail docked pigs and recorded the prevalence of performed and received TB, belly nosing, bar biting, ear biting and mounting.

TL;DR: It has been shown that counting tail raises or transitions between standing and lying could potentially be useful predictors of calving within the following six hours.

TL;DR: Castration will continue to be seen by many producers as a “routine” procedure, subject to varying degrees of recommendation of best practice or legislation depending on country, and subject to attention from animal welfare groups and policy-makers.

TL;DR: Experiments on pain in the chicken have not only identified acute and chronically painful conditions but also have provided information on qualitative differences in the pain experienced as well as identifying a cognitive component providing evidence of conscious pain perception.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the effect of time left alone on dog behaviour and cardiac activity and found that dogs showed a higher frequency of physical activity (P P T 2 (0.37,± 0.08, mean frequency of occurrence/15 s−± −SE) and T 4 ( 0.48,±-0.08; 0.21,±−0.05).

TL;DR: The present study investigated which behavioural fear responses can be observed during exposure of horses to a novel stimulus, whether these behavioural responses are correlated with physiological changes, and how specifically these changes are reduced after habituation training to one of the novel objects.

TL;DR: Investigation of agonistic behaviour of pigs after regrouping pigs under commercial sow farm conditions found dominant pigs were engaged in more agonistic interactions, had a longer total fight time and initiated more fights.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the impact of short-term stress of shearing on judgement bias, haematology, plasma cortisol and stress-induced hyperthermia (SIH) in sheep.

TL;DR: The findings of this study suggest that individual variation in oxygen consumption in respirometry chambers are related to the expression of coping styles: individuals with higher oxygen consumption at the start and throughout the measurement period were shown to react passively in a confinement stress.

TL;DR: The results indicate that the cows in this study had a partial preference to be indoors which is likely to be influenced by the TMR, allowing high yielding cows to meet their nutritional demands.

TL;DR: In this paper, a questionnaire was constructed to investigate the separation behavior in a sample of family dogs (Canis familiaris) (N = 45) and in parallel they have observed dogs' separationrelated behavior in simple behavioral test (Separation and greeting test, S&G).

TL;DR: In this paper, a new framework for great ape enrichment is proposed, inspired by a century of cognitive research, where problem-solving tasks that are designed so challenge the evolved cognitive skills of great apes might allow subjects to have more control in inherently restricted environments.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that lidocaine could be recommended for use in rainbow trout to ameliorate possible pain-related responses and none of the analgesics led to raised plasma cortisol compared to control groups.

TL;DR: It is suggested that zebrafish and checker barbs have a preference for complex environments, and the behavioural and ecological needs of fish may vary depending on species, and recommendations for husbandry should be specified at species level.

TL;DR: A genetic effect on environmental sensitivity is suggested and in order to make effective improvements it is important to estimate genetic parameters (both behavioural and physiological) under the conditions in which the animals will be kept.