Lecture 13: Motivation 3 Flashcards
What are management procedures and why are they done?
-Reduce the risk of integument injuries
-EX tail docking in piglets
-Beak trimming in egg-laying hens and turkeys to help decrease feather pecking (decreases mortality and morbidity)
Why do piglets bite their pen mates tails?
-Lots of sensory input
-Part of normal behaviour
-Animal-based outcome: integument damage/ injury
-Gentle chewing of the tail of one pig by another may result in only reddening/minor teeth marks on the tail of the recipient
-Vigorous biting can result in serious lesions and amputation of a portion of the recipients tail (when bleeds will attract other animals to it and to bite it)
-Welfare implications: tissue damage up to the spine, systemic infections, locomotion problems
Why do chickens feather peck and why is it a problem?
-Chicken uses its beak as if it were its hand
-Oral repetitive bird-bird pecking
-Often times victim not trying to escape
-One hen pecks at or plucks the feathers from another hen
-To perform injurious pecking: severe feather pecking
-Occurs in all housing systems and in all countries (world wide problem)
-Increased for hens kept for egg laying
-W/o an understanding we can’t prevent or terminate “outbreaks”
What are some comparisons from different studies looking at feather pecking?
-…Often complicated due to different methods and definitions, thresholds, flock age at time of recording, strains, and genetics whether or not birds were beak trimmed
What are 2 different methods to assess FP?
-Behavioural observations: labour intensive, time consuming (more difficult bc technologies can’t really help)
-Physical appearances: proxy for FP, feather cover scoring often considered vulnerable to subjective scoring or interpretation; requires training to be consistent (much easier to score physical appearances of animal)
What are physical appearance scoring methods in FP chickens?
Scoring categories:
-damage presence or absence score 0-2 vs 0-6
-Bald patches YES/NO
-Centimetres or % of body area affected
Number of body areas (range from 3-11)
Wether or not birds are captured and handled during the assessment
*note methods with more scoring categories and high number of body areas to be scared are more time-intensive and aching reliability b/w observer is more difficult
How does colour matter when considering FP?
B-Differences b/w white and brown feathered birds are often confounded with genetic strain
FP has had many names why is injurious pecking (IP) used?
-Different categories of behaviour that fall under the umbrella term IP
-Named after the consequences it can have in the form of injuries on the skin, feathers, and outgrowth
-Further classified in a number of ways: target area, pecking mechanism
What are underlying cases of severe FP?
-Multi-factoral problem with many contributing factors (nothing about causation)
-Approached from 2 angles:
1. The ethological view
2. The dysfunctional view
(both approaches may underlie the development of FP, but their relative importances and interactive are unknown)
What is the Ethological view of severe FP?
2 components
1. Goal oriented
2. Stimulus
-Summation of internal and external stimuli can be described as the basis of motivation, which causes behaviour
-Can be learned/changed
-Emotional/effective states
Summary: Motivated behaviours are goal-oriented, stimuli-senstive, can be learned or changed overtime and depend on emotional states
Explain more components and view points of the Ethological view.
-If animals left in highly motivated states and can’t reach a goal/achieve homeostasis, they may become frustrated and redirect that motivation to perform an undesirable behaviour
-Most of behavioural problems arise from normal motivation for species-specific behaviour
Through the Ethological view point what are the causes of severe FP?
Redirected behaviour either from frustration linked to food pecking, ground pecking, dust bathing
-Multifactorial process (genetic, rearing, nutrition, lighting etc)
-Occurs in every type of housing system
-Consequences can be worse in non-caged system where outbreaks can spread more easily
What is the Ethological view on foraging behaviour?
2 phases
1. Explorative phase
-Behaviour of animals when they are moving around in such a way that they are likely to encounter and acquire food
2. Consumption phase until reach goal
-Feeding behaviour can be divided into the appetitive phase, which is the food searching phase, and the consummatory act, which is the actual consumption of the food
What is the Ethological view on Unfulfilled motivation to explore?
-Unavailable of suitable floor substrate increases the risk of FP (emphasizes frustration and the exploration component)
-Misperceive feathers as foraging substrate, so peck at and pluck feathers
-This suggests severe FP may be a result of environments that lack sufficient stimuli for normal species-specific behaviour
What is the Ethological view on Unfulfilled motivation to explore- specific appetite?
-Diet of modern production systems provide non-naturalistic, low fibre, homogenous, concentrate-based diets ex in the form of pellets, despite evidence that coarse, fibre-rich diets can reduce severe FP
-Highly motivated to ingest feathers, work to obtain access to death rewards, the role of feathers as a feed component is not well understood
-ingestive feathers increase feed passage time/ gastrointestinal motility, crop/gizzard distension
-Ingested feathers alter gut microbiota composition
