Aggressive and submissive behavioural elements of captive wild boars in feeding situation

Nowadays the interest for wild boar hunting especially achieving big and safe hunting bag is growing. It is the reason why many wild boar preserves or hunting gardens were established in the last decades. The density is determined by the interest of the maximum economic profit in most of the gardens regardless of what is optimal for the animals. The high density may cause a social stress, indicated e.g. by the fights, which may cause not only serious negative welfare consequences but decrease in productivity and less economic result consequently. The behaviour of wild boars in hunting gardens is poorly studied. The aim of our study was to describe and determine of the most important aggressive and submissive behavioural elements which may sign the stress level of the animals. The observations were taken in intensive wild boar gardens on feeding places at feeding times. We recorded with a video camera the animals and analyzed their behaviour with Solomon Coder. We described four aggressive (running toward somebody, hit, chasing, bite) and four submissive (head lift, retreat, avoidance, escape) behavioural elements. These elements can be ranked depending on time length and physical contact and show relation with the hierarchy order. We think that based on these elements, we can work out a guide to describe the stress level in wild boar gardens

Non-invasive sleep EEG measurement in hand raised wolves

Sleep research greatly benefits from comparative studies to understand the underlying physiological and environmental factors affecting the different features of sleep, also informing us about the possible evolutionary changes shaping them. Recently, the domestic dog became an exceedingly valuable model species in sleep studies, as the use of non-invasive polysomnography methodologies enables direct comparison with human sleep data. In this study, we applied the same polysomnography protocol to record the sleep of dog’s closest wild relative, the wolf. We measured the sleep of seven captive (six young and one senior), extensively socialized wolves using a fully non-invasive sleep EEG methodology, originally developed for family dogs. We provide the first descriptive analysis of the sleep macrostructure and NREM spectral power density of wolves using a completely non-invasive methodology. For (non-statistical) comparison, we included the same sleep data of similarly aged dogs. Although our sample size was inadequate to perform statistical analyses, we suggest that it may form the basis of an international, multi-site collection of similar samples using our methodology, allowing for generalizable, unbiased conclusions. As we managed to register both macrostructural and spectral sleep data, our procedure appears to be suitable for collecting valid data in other species too, increasing the comparability of non-invasive sleep studies

Diet of wolves Canis lupus returning to Hungary

At the end of the nineteenth century, the wolf Canis lupus was extinct in Hungary and in recent decades has returned to the northern highland area of the country. The diet of wolves living in groups in Aggteleki National Park was investigated using scat analysis (n = 81 scats) and prey remains (n = 31 carcasses). Throughout the year wolves (average, minimum two wolves per year) consumed mostly wild-living ungulates (mean percent of biomass consumed, B% 97.2%; relative frequency of occurrence, %O 74.0%). The wild boar Sus scrofa was the most common prey item found in wolf scat (%B 35.6%) and is also the most commonly occurring ungulate in the study areas. The second most commonly occurring prey item in wolf scat was red deer Cervus elaphus (B% 32.8%). Conversely, prey remain analyses revealed wild boar as the second most commonly utilised prey species (%O 16.1%) after red deer (%O 67.7%). The roe deer Capreolus capreolus that occurs at lower population densities was the third most commonly utilised prey species. The importance of low population density mouflon Ovis aries, livestock and other food types was low. The results are similar to those found in the northern part of the Carpathian Mountains

A vaddisznó (Sus scrofa) zárttéri tartásban fellépő viselkedési problémái

A vaddisznó a vadgazd álkodás számára jelen t ő s bevét elt j elen t, szabad terül eten á llo- mánya fol yam atosan n ő ; a vaddisznós kerti vadászat irán ti ig ényeket mégis eg yre nehezebb teljesíte- ni, habár a kertb en lév ő állomány ok nag y része befogásból szár mazik . Ahhoz, ho gy a pár napos v adá- szat s orán a k ertet üz em elte t ő k b iztosít ani tud ják a vendég ek á ltal „elv árt” n agy teríték ű vadászatok at, nag y létszámban kell tar taniuk a vaddisznóka t. Ez pedig sokszor nag y állomán ys ű r ű séggel is p árosul, aminek oka a kis, általában 200 és 500 hek tár kö zötti kiterjedés ű terül et. Zárt tar tásban, leg yen az va- dászati célú ker t, vag y hús term elést szolgá ló far m, a s peci ális életkörülm ények miatt a z eg yedek vi- selkedése meg f og válto zni a szabadterü leti társaikhoz kép est. A v izsgálat során szabadterületi és k erti állomán yok, kon dák viselked ésbeli különbség eit vizsgá ltuk eg y táplálék-kompetí ciós hely zetb en, rá- világítva íg y azo kra a lehetséges okokra, amely ek miatt a kertek t öbbsége nem ön fenntar tó, az ottani szaporulat jelen t ő s része elhullik . Az er edmén yeink alap ján elm ondható, hog y a vaddisznóskertben me gn ő tt az eg yedek szociális interakci ókkal tö ltött ideje, míg a tápl álkozásra for dított id ejük ped ig jelent ő sen kev esebb volt. A kerti kocákat tek intv e, jelen t ő sen megn ő tt agr essziót fig yelh ettünk m eg. Összességében elmondható, hog y a nag yobb állomán ys ű r ű ség okozta stressz a malacokra volt jelen- t ő s hatással, mely negatív h atás ok azonban eddigi vizsgálataink ered mén yei és javaslataink alapján csökkenthet ő ek lennének

Adult, intensively socialized wolves show features of attachment behaviour to their handler

Dogs’ attachment towards humans might be the core of their social skillset, yet the origins of their ability to build such a bond are still unclear. Here we show that adult, hand-reared wolves, similarly to dogs, form individualized relationship with their handler. During separation from their handler, wolves, much like family dogs, showed signs of higher-level stress and contact seeking behaviour, compared to when an unfamiliar person left them. They also used their handler as a secure base, suggesting that the ability to form interspecific social bonds could have been present already in the common ancestor of dogs and wolves. We propose that their capacity to form at least some features of attachment with humans may stem from the ability to form social bond with pack members. This might have been then re-directed to humans during early domestication, providing the basis for the evolution of other socio-cognitive abilities in dogs

A kőrösladányi vadaskert vaddisznó állományának hatása a védett növényekre.

A vaddisznó negatív hatását különböző veszélyeztetett növény- és állatfajok populációira számos vizsgálat igazolta, ugyanakkor egyes kutatások jelzik lehetséges pozitív ökológiai szerepét is. A DALERD Zrt kőrösladányi vaddisznóskertjében 2007-2010. között vizsgáltuk két védett növényfaj állományának alakulását. Random módon elhelyezett 35 db nyílt és 10 db elkerített 10 m2-es kvadrátban becsültük a tőszámokat és a bolygatást a vadászkertben, a nevelőkertben és a kerten kívül. A vaddisznó populációsűrűsége a nevelőkertben a legmagasabb, míg a kerten kívül szinte nincsen vaddisznó. A két faj, a sziki kocsord (Peucedanum officinale) és a pettyegetett őszirózsa (Aster sedifolius) esetében nem találtunk jelentős károsítást a vizsgálati időszak alatt. Néhány helyen megtúrták az állatok a talajt a növények körül, de a legtöbb kvadrátban inkább tőszámnövekedést lehetett kimutatni mindkét növényfaj esetében. A elkerített és a nyílt kvadrátok tőszáma között sem találtunk szignifikáns eltérést a négy év során. Ezek alapján látszik, hogy érdemes a hatás valós mértékét felmérni minden esetben, hogy megtaláljuk a legjobb technológiát és a megfelelő populáció sűrűséget, amellyel a legkisebb mértékre csökkenthetjük a károkozást és a konfliktusokat

Challenges of machine learning model validation using correlated behaviour data: Evaluation of cross-validation strategies and accuracy measures.

Automated monitoring of the movements and behaviour of animals is a valuable research tool. Recently, machine learning tools were applied to many species to classify units of behaviour. For the monitoring of wild species, collecting enough data for training models might be problematic, thus we examine how machine learning models trained on one species can be applied to another closely related species with similar behavioural conformation. We contrast two ways to calculate accuracies, termed here as overall and threshold accuracy, because the field has yet to define solid standards for reporting and measuring classification performances. We measure 21 dogs and 7 wolves, and find that overall accuracies are between 51 and 60% for classifying 8 behaviours (lay, sit, stand, walk, trot, run, eat, drink) when training and testing data are from the same species and between 41 and 51% when training and testing is cross-species. We show that using data from dogs to predict the behaviour of wolves is feasible. We also show that optimising the model for overall accuracy leads to similar overall and threshold accuracies, while optimizing for threshold accuracy leads to threshold accuracies well above 80%, but yielding very low overall accuracies, often below the chance level. Moreover, we show that the most common method for dividing the data between training and testing data (random selection of test data) overestimates the accuracy of models when applied to data of new specimens. Consequently, we argue that for the most common goals of animal behaviour recognition overall accuracy should be the preferred metric. Considering, that often the goal is to collect movement data without other methods of observation, we argue that training data and testing data should be divided by individual and not randomly