Lecture 19 Flashcards
what could be considered one of the ultimate cause of social behaviour
Space
What can social relationship lead to?
- Aggregation ( food avalible, mating, environment)
- Territorial behaviour
Lone animals could result from:
- Physical environment
- Pushed from a herd
- Age
- Chance of mortality
Three most common types of social behaviours are:
- Dominance hierarchies
- Agonistic behaviour
- Territoriality
What is territoriality?
One animal or a group of animals controls an area and its resources by repelling other animals through many ways (urine, poop)
Why is territory always changing in size and shape?
- Food availability
- Size of population
- Season (cold - they group together)
Why defend a territory?
- Reproductive fitness
- Food availability
What are the two methods of defending territory?
- Overt aggression
- Signalling (less risk of injury, less energy) - visual, eye contact, posturing, growling
How do horses use signalling to mark territory?
- Territories marked by olfactory cues
- Wild/feral horses use manure piles along pathways which can actually separate bands of horses
- In pastured horses, the stallion will actually back into an existing manure pile of his and eliminate there to create larger piles with his own scent
How do cattle signal to mark territory?
- Erratic movements
- Tail flicking
- Ground pawing
- Turning sideways
- Pinned ears
- snorting
What are the factors that cause size of territory?
- Species
- Gender of the animal
- Food availability
- Predators
- cost of protecting territory
Why are the territories of wild jungle fowl and one in zoo different?
jungle= 8-32km
zoo= 50-75m
food and water, and protected
What is the benefit to sharing territory?
Owners sometimes allow satellites to share food if plentiful, satellites can help defend owner (produces vs scroungers)
How does individual space differ in hens?
- Far away when walking
- Closer when ground pecking
- Even closer when standing
- Closest when preening
depends on behaviour being preformed
What do livestock need space for?
- Grazing - feeding
- Social interaction
- Manure issues
- Exercise
- mental stimulation
- Behavioural preferences
What are the four outlooks we use to establish space requirements?
- Economical - space required to achieve maximum economic return
- Biological - space required to achieve max productivity
- Affective state - space required to maximize positive and minimize negative behaviour
- Natural living - space required to allow birds to perform basic behaviours that they would be in the wild like nesting, perching, running
How does varying space allowances affect cows?
- Coat condition
- Behaviour analysis (positive and negative)
- Injury
- Might include productivity - not always
What is the definition of social behaviour?
Suite of interactions that occur between two or more individual animals, usually of the same species, when they form aggrigates, cooperate in sexual or parental behaviour, engage in disputes over territory and access to mates, or simply communicate across space
What is territoriality in dogs or wolves?
- In dogs, trigger factors can be territoriality, and others
- In wolves, show signaling or aggression to other
strangers or dogs within their territory - barking,
growling, or stronger aggressive acts - More in dogs between 1-3 years old
- Seen more in guard dogs
Signalling
* Barking
* Territorial call of dogs
* Used to defend a territory and demarcate its
boundaries
Stray dogs which don’t have a real home rarely bark…. why?
keep attention away from themselves
What is territoriality in cats?
- Also exhibit territorial aggression
- Sudden or explosive, with or without vocalization
- Often initiated by smell
- eye contact for signalling
What do roosters do for signalling?
- Crowing of roosters
- Frequency associated with comb size (testosterone makes it more red and bigger)
*
How do we establish how much space animals need?
engineering standards
animal based standards
