Abstract

Individual housing of dairy calves is common farm practice, but has negative effects on calf welfare. A compromise between practice and welfare may be housing calves in pairs. We compared learning performances and affective states as assessed in a judgement bias task of individually housed and pair-housed calves. Twenty-two calves from each housing treatment were trained on a spatial Go/No-go task with active trial initiation to discriminate between the location of a teat-bucket signalling either reward (positive location) or non-reward (negative location). We compared the number of trials to learn the operant task (OT) for the trial initiation and to finish the subsequent discrimination task (DT). Ten pair-housed and ten individually housed calves were then tested for their responses to ambiguous stimuli positioned in-between the positive and negative locations. Housing did not affect learning speed (OT: F1,35 = 0.39, P = 0.54; DT: F1,19  = 0.15, P = 0.70), but pair-housed calves responded more positively to ambiguous cues than individually housed calves (χ21 = 6.79, P = 0.009), indicating more positive affective states. This is the first study to demonstrate that pair housing improves the affective aspect of calf welfare when compared to individual housing.

Details

Title
Pair housing makes calves more optimistic
Author
Bučková, Katarína 1 ; Špinka, Marek 1 ; Hintze, Sara 2 

 Department of Ethology and Companion Animal Science, Faculty of Agrobiology, Food and Natural Resources, Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague 6, Czech Republic; Department of Ethology, Institute of Animal Science, Přátelství 815, 104 00 Prague-Uhřínevěs, Prague, Czech Republic 
 Division of Livestock Sciences, Department of Sustainable Agricultural Systems, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria 
Pages
1-9
Publication year
2019
Publication date
Dec 2019
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20452322
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2330969396
Copyright
© 2019. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.