Feeding Behaviour Flashcards
What is feeding behaviour?
Any action of an animal that is directed toward the procurement of nutrients
Has a distinctive appetitive and consummatory phase
- Appetite increases motivation
- Consummatory behaviour decreases motivation
Optimality
Intrinsic reason why animals need to eat. Extremely important for production animals because more they eat, more they grow, resulting in more meat or more produce.
What drives optimality of food intake?
- Originally thought to be based on energy (and time)
- Now considered more of a multifactorial control because food intake is all about minimizing the total discomfort generated by the several signals from various body systems
- Also must take into account overall fitness of the animal over its lifetime.
Feeding Behaviour and sickness
- Many diseases or painful procedures result in alterations of feeding and/or ruminating patterns
- There are also various health issues (eg. Obesity, rumen acidosis) caused by the animal’s inability to develop accurate associations between the food content in its diet and their post-ingestive consequences
Factors impacting feeding behaviours
External
- Surroundings
- Food characteristics
Internal
- Previous experience
- Body signals
Previous experiences and their impact on feeding behaviour
Having good experiences will increase the ability for an animal to initiate feeding, their rate of ingestion, and their efficiency of finding food
Ex. Previous bad experiences with a specific type of food will likely cause an animal to choose not to eat the food type again
Ex. Herd hierarchy- being lower in the hierarchy will cause an animal to decide not to get up and eat
Body signals and their impact on feeding behaviour
Many different internal signals that stimulate feeding behaviour in an animal
Includes
- Visual, taste, and olfactory input
- Hormones (Leptin, Ghrelin, Amylin)
- Gastrointestinal receptors (Mechanosensitivity- tension and motility, Chemosensitivity- osmolality and acidity)
- Liver receptors (Glucose, Nitrogenous compounds, osmolality)
Conditioned Taste Aversion
- Use the taste input to deter ruminants from eating specific plants within a vineyard but to get them to eat all of the weeds instead
- Spray the vineyard plants with lithium chloride but avoid the weeds. The ruminants will associate the vineyard plants with the negative consequence of the bad taste and will avoid eating them, and will eat weeds instead. Only need to spray in first few days to create an association but then over time the ruminants will lose association and the vineyard plants will need to be sprayed again.
Food characteristics and its impact on feeding behaviours
Different food characteristics will impact whether an animal will choose or want to feed.
Includes:
1. Amount and type of grain and forage (particle size/effective fiber, degradability/digestibility)
2. Feed additives (flavours, monensin, sodium bicarbonate) can make feed more appealing. Monesin and sodium bicarbonate reduces acidity in stomach making them more likely to eat.
3. While foraging: spatial distribution, abundance, ease of prehension, palatability, filling effect
Feeding management and its impact on feeding behaviour
The way that an animal is fed has a major impact on feeding behaviour
- Feeding frequency- More food deliveries will result in more stable consumption
- Feed Bunk Management- ad libitum (free to eat whenever they want) vs. restricted feeding, clean bunk vs. dirty bunk
- Consistency of feeding- Irregular schedules (delays, health issues) may cause animals to ingest larger quantities of feed during a short time because they are not sure when the next feeding will come
Surroundings impact on feeding behaviours
When food is limited in their surroundings, the animals will feed at faster rates
Automatic feeding monitoring systems
- Often used for herd animals who need to be housed in groups for good animal welfare, because when in large groups, it is hard to determine how much and for how long an individual is feeding. These feed bunks control which individual is allowed to eat and calculate how much they are eating.
- Can tell us about meal frequency, feeding time, meal length, feeding rate, meal size, feed intake, and meal frequency
Negative component to automatic feeding systems
Causes competition between feed bunks due to the restrictive environment. Individuals will bully each other to get to the feed. Sometimes it will result in an individual choosing not to eat because if they stay out of the way then they won’t be bullied.
