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Disorders of Animal Behaviour > Assessing animal welfare through a behavioural lens > Flashcards

Assessing animal welfare through a behavioural lens Flashcards

1
Q

What are the five freedoms?

A
  • Freedom from hunger and thirst
  • Freedom from discomfot
  • Freedom from pain, injury or disease
  • Freedom to express normal behaviour
  • Freedom from fear and distress
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2
Q

What is the issue with the five freedoms model?

A
  • Doesn’t capture the mental state of the animal
  • Want to promote positive welfare states
  • This is why we have moved onto the five domains model which have been adapted from the five freedoms
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3
Q

What are the five domains?

A
  • Nutrition
  • physical environment
  • health
  • behavioural interactions
  • mental state
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4
Q

What is meant by having ‘good welfare’? Has this definition changed over time?

A

Current definition: absence of negative experiences + presence of positive experiences

Past thoughts: Animal welfare traditionally measured just negative experiences -> An idea that good welfare is an absence or low level of negative experiences

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5
Q

What are some examples of positive experiences?

A
  • Vitality
  • Companionship
  • Contentment
  • Satiety
  • Happiness
  • Curiosity
  • Exploration
  • Foraging
  • Play
  • Anticipatory behaviour
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6
Q

How do we know if an animal is in a good state of welfare?

A

Assessed looking at their:
- Nutrition
- Environment
- Health
- Behaviour
- Motivation
- Affective state/emotions (how an animal is feeling)

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7
Q

How has researched changed over time in regards to animal emotions?

A
  • Charles darwin focussed on discrete emotions in 1872.
  • From the 20th century till now there has been more focus on how the animals feel and it is now widely accepted that animals feel pain and suffering
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8
Q

How can emotion be defined?

A
  • Are intense but short living reactions to a specific event or stimulus
  • Have high adaptive value
  • Allows avoidance of harm and seeking of reward
  • They facilitate responses to external stimuli or internal events
  • Accumulate to create long-lasting affective states
  • Danger -> emotion of fear -> flight instinct (increased RR and HR)
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9
Q

Why might the study of emotions be difficult?

A
  • Risk of anthropomorphism
  • No exact knowledge of what animal experiences are about
  • Is it possible to study emotion when the animal cannot tell us how they feel?
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10
Q

Explain the dimensional approach for studying emotions in animals based on this diagram.

A
  • Q1 states: When a reward is presented
    o Associated with high arousal, positive valence
    o Happy and excited
  • Q4 states: When a punisher is presented (the main focus of past animal research)
    o Anxious or fearful
    o Highly arousal state, negative valance
  • Q3 states: When a reward is removed
    o Accompanied by emotions of sadness or depression
    o Negative valence low arousal state
  • Q2 states: When a punisher is removed
    o Associated with a relaxed or calm emotion
    o Positively valanced and low arousal state
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11
Q

What are the indicators of an animal experiencing emotion?

A
  • There are cognitive signs (e.g. increased attention towards the stimulus)
  • There are neurophysiological changes (e.g. change in brain activity or heart rate)
  • There are behavioural changes (e.g. facial expression, vocal behaviour)
  • Studies of animal emotion involve looking at one or more of these changes
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12
Q

What are positive emotions a sign of?

A

Good welfare

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13
Q

What are negative emotions a sign of?

A

Bad welfare

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14
Q

What is the general approach to studying animal behaviour?

A
  • Observe and measure the animal’s responses in order to identify indications of negative or positive feelings
  • Offer the animal some control over specific resources or experiences, and observe the decisions that the animal makes
  • Assess cognitive function in response to negative, positive, and ambiguous stimuli
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15
Q

Since cognitive indicators can be used to assess emotion in animals, what cognitive bias tasks (3) can we perform to assess emotion? Give an example for each task.

A

Attention bias
- Involves looking at changes to an animal’s attention when they are provided with an ambiguous cue
- E.g. Hungry sheep more pessimistic? The effects of food restriction on cognitive bias and the involvement of ghrelin in its regulation

Memory bias
- We cannot ask an animal to recall events and therefore this is not done in animals

Judgement bias
- Involves looking at whether an animal is optimistic or pessimistic when exposed to an ambiguous cue
- Animal exposed to stressful/unpredictable environment or chronic stress -> animal will judge ambiguous cues more pessimistically
- Animal provided with environmental enrichment -> animal will judge ambiguous cues more optimistically
- E.g. Pain and Pessimism: Dairy calves exhibit negative judgement bias following hot-iron disbudding

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16
Q

What would we look at when assessing physiological indicators of emotionsi in animals? Give an example.

A
  • Changes relating to HPA function or changes in sympathetic/autonomic function
  • Involves: Heart rate (beats per minute), Heart rate variability (inter-beat intervals), Respiration, Cortisol and Oxytocin
  • Example: Emotions in goats: mapping physiological, behavioural and vocal profiles -> Social isolation -> increased arousal -> increased HR, decreased HRV, increased respiration
17
Q

How would we assess emotion based on behavioural indicators?

A

This involves assessing the functionally relevant action tendencies that accompany emotional states such as:
- Facial expressions
- Eye white exposure
- Body language
- Ear posture
- Neck posture
- Tail posture
- Locomotory activity
- Vocal expressions

BUT for behaviours to be reliable indicators of arousal and valence they need to occur consistently across a range of contexts

18
Q

Vocal expression is just one behavioural indicator of emotion, give an example of how this might be used to assess emotion in dairy cows from giving birth through to separation of the calf from the cow.

A

Vocal indicators of emotion in dairy cows: Peripartum context-related cues found in vocalisations and phonatory behaviours
- Parturition -> tongue curled, mouth open, lower pitch, longer duration, rougher sounding
- Calf interactions -> closed mouth, single isolated calls, longer time between sequences
- Separation -> mixed mouth position, higher in max pitch and more variable around pitch. Calls in sequences, more vocal units per sequence
- Non-invasively, visually and aurally assess peripartum cow welfare

19
Q

Explain the source filter theory.

A

A theory enabling us to understand vocal production mechanisms. Two independent processes:
- Source of sound: Where the sound is produced
- Filter of sound: Sound radiated out of the filter into the environment

20
Q

What are the stativ and dynamic vocal features?

A
  • Dynamic – source related vocal features change with physiological arousal. For example: Animal exposure to stressor -> activation of SNS -> changes to respiration, salivation, muscles -> changes to vocal features (e.g. increased pitch, increase rate) -> can be measured and quantified to make assumptions about their emotional state
  • Static – vocal tract is anatomically constrained by skeletal structures
21
Q

In positive low arousal states, what mouth configuration and sounds will we see and hear?

A
  • Closed mouth configuration -> Shorter duration, more harmonic and of a lower amplitude
22
Q

In negative high arousal states, what mouth configuration and sounds will we see and hear?

A
  • Open mouth configuration -> longer duration, rougher, higher amplitude
23
Q

What behavioural tests can we use to assess or determine emotion?

A
  • Conditioning and learned responses
  • Novel object/open field tests
  • Startle tests
  • Preference tests
  • Avoidance tests
  • Operant tests
24
Q

What might a preference test look like?

A

Animal might be exposed to a Y or T maze with different options at either end, the animla then makes a choice. Can be tested for food, lighting, flooring, companions etc.

25
Q

What might an operant test look like?

A
  • Measuring an animal’s ‘willingness to pay’ for a resource
  • Animals obtain a resource through their behaviour
  • Measures the strength of an animal’s motivation
  • Example: Cow solving a puzzle (getting through a barrier) to get to a positive thing (a rotating brush)
26
Q

Is play behaviour more or less likely to be shown when is a negative or positive affective state?

A

Play behaviour is more likely when in a positive affective state

27
Q

What is anticipatory behaviour?

A
  • Biologically significant preparatory behaviour
  • It is typical arousal with goal-directed activity
  • Anticipation is a motivational state involving the period between a signal indicating the arrival of a reward (+ve) and the provision of the actual reward
  • Can provide info on the emotional state of an animal -> typically absent in a low welfare state
28
Q

Can you make an assessment on emotion based on one measure alone (ie behavioural, cognitive OR physiological)?

A

No, an integrative approach is best as it allows you to make direct relationships between variables

29
Q

Why is research in the area of animal emotion and welfare so important?

A

Improvements in animal welfare by considering their cognitive abilities
- Animal welfare assessment now includes both the physical and mental health of the species
- Pressure for animals to have a ‘good life’

Also for:
- Pain research
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Human science (knowledge of basic emotional systems may apply to humans and to determine which species would best model certain human issues)

30
Q

What would we look at when assessing physiological indicators of emotionsi in animals? Give an example.

A
  • Changes relating to HPA function or changes in sympathetic/autonomic function
  • Involves: Heart rate (beats per minute), Heart rate variability (inter-beat intervals), Respiration, Cortisol and Oxytocin
  • Example: Emotions in goats: mapping physiological, behavioural and vocal profiles -> Social isolation -> increased arousal -> increased HR, decreased HRV, increased respiration
31
Q

How has researched changed over time in regards to animal emotions?

A
  • Charles darwin focussed on discrete emotions in 1872.
  • From the 20th century till now there has been more focus on how the animals feel and it is now widely accepted that animals feel pain and suffering

Disorders of Animal Behaviour (10 decks)

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