Study Set I Flashcards
What are the five freedoms of animal welfare?
Freedom from thirst and hunger
Freedom from discomfort
Freedom from pain, injury, or disease
Freedom to express normal behavior
Freedom from fear and distress
Which fields are in the cognitive psychology hexagon
Philosophy
Linguistics
Psychology
Neuroscience
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropology
What should we focus on if we want to improve the welfare and
behavior of animals?
Focus on the emotion not the behavior
What behavior gives laying hens freedom from fear?
Hiding when the hen lays eggs
What are stereotypies? Why do captive animals engage in them?
Abnormal repetitive behavior
A captive animal suffered or is suffering in a past or current environment and engages in stereotypies to sooth its suffering
Do animals and people have the same or different core emotion systems in the brain?
Yes
Dr. Jaak Panksepp hypothesized a set of core emotions and called them “core” for a
particular reason relating to neuroscience. What is it?
Blue-Ribbon Emotions
They generate well-organized behavior sequences that can be evoked by localized electrical stimulation of the brain
Be able to recognize, and know the main features of, Panksepp’s four core emotions and three special-purpose ones
SEEKING: The positive emotions of wanting, looking forward
to, or being curious about something
RAGE: Core emotion that gives a captured animal the explosive energy it needs to struggle violently and maybe shock the predator into loosening its grip long enough
that the captured animal can get away
FEAR: Occurs when survival is threatened in any way, from the physical to the mental and social
PANIC: Social attachment system
What is the main pleasure in seeking: the process or the result?
The process
Why would animals hide signs of bad welfare?
So that predators cannot detect their weakness
How can we tell if an animal’s welfare is OK?
By observing an animal’s stereotypies
A shocking percentage of farm, lab, zoo and pet animals show stereotypies (> 91% of pigs,
> 82% of poultry, 50% of lab mice, > 18% of horses, etc.). What are some examples of them?
Pacing, rocking, gerbils digging tunnels in their cages, repetitive jumping, and tongue rolling
Why don’t animals born in the wild and then made captive have as many stereotypies as
those raised in captivity?
Wild-caught animals were living in a
rich, natural environment when they were young and their brains were
developing
In terms of the 5 core emotions, what should we do with animals in our care?
DON’T stimulate RAGE, FEAR, and PANIC if you can help it, and
DO stimulate SEEKING and also PLAY
Regarding Grandin’s Disneyland pig experiment, what was her hypothesis (based on her advisor’s rat experiment)?
The brains of the Disneyland pigs would show
more dendritic growth than the brains of the barren-environment pigs
Regarding Grandin’s Disneyland pig experiment, what was the experimental setup?
Twelve of my piglets lived in six baby pens with perforated plastic floors and nothing much to do. The other twelve lived in
a Disneyland for pigs with lots of straw to root in and toys to play with: plastic balls, old telephone books they could rip up, boards, and a metal pipe they could roll around the floor. Every day I was putting new things in
and taking old things out.
Regarding Grandin’s Disneyland pig experiment, how did she determine whether her hypothesis was right?
Back then the only way to compare neurons from one brain to another was to
spend hours and hours staring into a microscope and drawing the cells by
hand, which I did. I looked at two parts of the pigs’ cortex: the visual cortex and the
somatosensory cortex, which receives information from the pig’s snout.
Which batch of piglets actually had greater dendritic growth? In which part of brain?
Why?
Barren-environment pigs
Somatosensory cortex
Underactivation of the SEEKING system led to abnormal brain growth
Grandin concluded that it’s not just the environment but what that makes dendrites
grow?
The animal’s behaviors and actions in its environment
What is Grandin’s big conclusion, which has to do with animal welfare?
It is important to satisfy the SEEKING system to prevent abnormal brain development
Wynne believes that the word ‘thought’ is anthropomorphism verging on
anthropocentrism. Why?
Talking about “thinking” animals tricks us into believing we understand animal mental life better than we really do
What is filial cannibalism? Know the sand goby example.
Animals that, far from caring for their young, actually eat their own of spring
Sand goby: father fish were able to
obtain an energetic benefit for themselves with no decrease in the number of their offspring that survived when they ate their offspring in low-oxygen environments
What is ethology
The study of animal behavior with emphasis on the behavioral patterns that occur in natural environments
In ethology, four questions are key; know their thumbnail definitions:
Function: adaptive purpose/advantage
Phylogeny: how it evolved and how it varies in related species
Ontogeny: how it develops over a lifetime
Mechanism: how it is caused in the animal’s Brain: how it is learned if it is learned
Know the three (rough) classes of animal scientists and their orientations; understand how each might push back against the others (though it’s not a zero-sum game).
Behaviorists: lab experiments; highly controlled; simpler behaviors
Cognitive psychologists: complex behaviors; must speculate
Ethologists: behavior in the wild
What is anthropomorphism
The attribution of human properties to nonhuman entities
What is anthropocentrism
Philosophical viewpoint arguing that human beings are the central or most significant entities in the world
What is anthropomorphism by omission
The failure to consider that other animals have a different world than ours
Rivas and Burghardt think that it’s anthropomorphic for researchers to spend so much time on aposematic coloration (know this term). What do they think would be less
anthropomorphic?
Less research should be devoted to studying
aposematic coloration and more time should be spent researching aposematic scents, aposematic vocalizations, and aposematic textures
What does it mean for zoo exhibits to be anthropomorphic?
Zoo exhibits, even the most modern, are often
shaped much more by the needs of the human visitors or human caretakers than the animals shown living in supposedly ‘‘natural’’ settings
