Foraging for foundations in decision neuroscience: insights from ethology

Modern decision neuroscience offers a powerful and broad account of human behaviour using computational techniques that link psychological and neuroscientific approaches to the ways that individuals can generate near-optimal choices in complex controlled environments. However, until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which the structure of experimental environments relates to natural scenarios, and the survival problems that individuals have evolved to solve. This situation not only risks leaving decision-theoretic accounts ungrounded but also makes various aspects of the solutions, such as hard-wired or Pavlovian policies, difficult to interpret in the natural world. Here, we suggest importing concepts, paradigms and approaches from the fields of ethology and behavioural ecology, which concentrate on the contextual and functional correlates of decisions made about foraging and escape and address these lacunae

Synchronized lying in cattle in relation to time of day

Postural synchrony, in which cattle lie down or stand up at the same time as other members of their herd, occurs both in animals housed indoors when enough resources are available and in those out at pasture, but the mechanisms by which such synchrony is achieved are poorly understood. We report a study of 6 groups of young cattle (Bos taurus) at pasture in which our aim was to study postural synchrony at different times of day and in relation to the postures of neighbouring cattle. All of the observed groups exhibited a high degree of synchrony in lying/standing, as 70% of animals in a group exhibited the same posture over 93% of the time. Time of day had a significant effect (P≈0.0046): cattle were least synchronized in the middle of the day and most synchronized in the morning and evening. With the increasing use of synchrony of lying as a measure of welfare in cattle, such temporal effects need to be taken into account. Cattle were more synchronized with the posture of a near neighbour than they were with that of a randomly chosen member of the herd (P≈0.016), suggesting that cattle were actively synchronizing their postures with that of their neighbours. These results indicate that a full understanding of the mechanisms of postural synchronization in cattle herds will need to incorporate both collective (allelomimetic) and concurrent (individual) responses. © 2012 Elsevier B.V

Synchronized lying in cattle in relation to time of day

Postural synchrony, in which cattle lie down or stand up at the same time as other members of their herd, occurs both in animals housed indoors when enough resources are available and in those out at pasture, but the mechanisms by which such synchrony is achieved are poorly understood. We report a study of 6 groups of young cattle (Bos taurus) at pasture in which our aim was to study postural synchrony at different times of day and in relation to the postures of neighbouring cattle. All of the observed groups exhibited a high degree of synchrony in lying/standing, as 70% of animals in a group exhibited the same posture over 93% of the time. Time of day had a significant effect (P≈0.0046): cattle were least synchronized in the middle of the day and most synchronized in the morning and evening. With the increasing use of synchrony of lying as a measure of welfare in cattle, such temporal effects need to be taken into account. Cattle were more synchronized with the posture of a near neighbour than they were with that of a randomly chosen member of the herd (P≈0.016), suggesting that cattle were actively synchronizing their postures with that of their neighbours. These results indicate that a full understanding of the mechanisms of postural synchronization in cattle herds will need to incorporate both collective (allelomimetic) and concurrent (individual) responses. © 2012 Elsevier B.V

Zoo Animal Welfare.

The continuing existence of zoos and their good purposes such as conservation, science, education, and recreation, can be ethically justified only if zoos guarantee the welfare of their animals. The usual criteria for measuring animal welfare in zoos are physical health, long life, and reproduction. This paper looks at these criteria and finds them insufficient. Additional criteria are submitted to expand the range of welfare considerations: natural and abnormal behavior; freedom and choice; and dignity. All these criteria should play a role in analyzing zoo animal welfare and interests but dignity has the overriding part because it impacts on both animal and human interests

Prediction of feather damage in laying hens using optical flows and Markov models

Feather pecking in laying hens is a major welfare and production problem for commercial egg producers, resulting in mortality, loss of production as well as welfare issues for the damaged birds. Damaging outbreaks of feather pecking are currently impossible to control, despite a number of proposed interventions. However, the ability to predict feather damage in advance would be a valuable research tool for identifying which management or environmental factors could be the most effective interventions at different ages. This paper proposes a framework for forecasting the damage caused by injurious pecking based on automated image processing and statistical analysis. By frame-by-frame analysis of video recordings of laying hen flocks, optical flow measures are calculated as indicators of the movement of the birds. From the optical flow datasets, measures of disturbance are extracted using hidden Markov models. Based on these disturbance measures and age-related variables, the levels of feather damage in flocks in future weeks is predicted. Applying the proposed method to real-world datasets, it is shown that the disturbance measures offer improved predictive values for feather damage thus enabling an identification of flocks with probable prevalence of damage and injury later in lay