Animal Studies Commons^™

Arkansas Animal Science Department Report 2000, Zelpha B. Johnson, D. Wayne Kellogg

Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station Research Series

Animal Science is very much devoted to youth education and development. During the past year, over 20,000 youth were involved in 4-H livestock projects. Two very successful activities that took place last year were the Mid-American Grassland Evaluation Contest and Livestock Judging Camps. The Grassland Contest is designed to teach students about grassland resource management for livestock and wildlife uses. The contest was held in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Firstplace honors in the 4-H division went to White County, and second place honors went to Van Buren County. Two Livestock Judging Camps (Fayetteville and Hope) were conducted this past year. A …

Animal Emotions: Exploring Passionate Natures, Marc Bekoff

Sentience Collection

No abstract provided.

Primate Numerical Competence: Contributions Toward Understanding Nonhuman Cognition, Sarah T. Boysen, Karen I. Hallberg

Sentience Collection

Nonhuman primates represent the most significant extant species for comparative studies of cognition, including such complex phenomena as numerical competence, among others. Studies of numerical skills in monkeys and apes have a long, though somewhat sparse history, although questions for current empirical studies remain of great interest to several fields, including comparative, developmental, and cognitive psychology; anthropology; ethology; and philosophy, to name a few. In addition to demonstrated similarities in complex information processing, empirical studies of a variety of potential cognitive limitations or constraints have provided insights into similarities and differences across the primate order, and continue to offer theoretical …

Environmental Guidelines For New And Existing Piggeries, A Latto, John Noonan, R. J. Taylor

Bulletins 4000 -

These guidelines apply to the management of Western Australia piggeries in Western Australia, including intensive Growing pigs under intensive conditions where the and extensive operations, straw-based housing and animals spend their entire life cycle indoors, is an combinations of these (otherwise referred to as semi- important part of the Western Australian and intensive housing).

Agonistic Behaviour And Biogenic Amines In Shore Crabs Carcinus Maenas, Lynne U. Sneddon, Alan C. Taylor, Felicity A. Huntingford, David G. Watson

Sentience Collection

To investigate the role of certain neurohormones in agonistic behaviour, fights were staged between pairs of size-matched male shore crabs Carcinus maenas, and blood samples were taken immediately after the contests had been resolved. Samples were also taken from these crabs at rest (before and after fighting) and after walking on a treadmill. A control group of crabs also had samples taken on each experimental day. Concentrations of tyramine, dopamine, octopamine, serotonin (5-HT) and norepinephrine were determined in each blood sample using a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC-MS) system. Norepinephrine was not detectable in any of the samples, but the standards …

Reproductive Behavior Of The Emu, Reema A. Persad, Douglas James, Nicholas B. Anthony

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

Members of a flock of male and female emus were observed in an ethological experiment designed to investigate trends in reproductive behavior exhibited during the North American mating season, which lasts from October to mid-March. Observations were made at dawn, noon, and dusk from December 1999 to mid-March 2000, and the only behaviors that were consistently expressed during these times were pecking, strutting, exclusive, and male and female sexual activities (defined in text). Though statistical significance was found between male strutting behavior and female sexual activity in the December observation period, no overall significance or significance at other observation periods …

Growth And Performance Of Broiler Chicks During The Starter And Grower Phases In Phase-Feeding, L. Niki Loupe, Jason L. Emmert

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of a nutrition program referred to as “phase-feeding” (PF) over the first 6 weeks posthatching. Diets were formulated using amino acid recommendations from the National Research Council (NRC) (1994) or from linear regression equations generated from best estimates of lysine (Lys), sulfur amino acid (SAA), and threonine (Thr) requirements. Regression equations were used to predict weekly Lys, SAA, and Thr requirements for use in a PF regimen that involved lowering amino acid levels following each respective week of the experiment, resulting in six diets fed over the 6-week period. Over the entire …

Arkansas Animal Science Department Report 1999, Zelpha B. Johnson, D. Wayne Kellogg

Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station Research Series

No abstract provided.

Feasibility Of Inducing Overlap Immunologic Competence In Gallinaceous Birds With Ascardia Dissimilis And A. Galli, Julie Hamilton, Thomas A. Yazwinski

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

Chickens and turkeys are routinely infected with the roundworms Ascaridia galli and A. dissimilis, respectively. The current study was conducted to gather basic information on these worms and to determine whether heterologous infections (chicken worms in turkeys and turkey worms in chickens) would be successful. Chickens and turkeys were obtained at day of hatch, brooded to 7 days of age, and placed in pens (25/pen) according to infection as received at 7 days of age: homologous, heterologous and control (no infection). Bird weights, mortalities, and feed efficiencies were monitored for 3 weeks postinfection, at which time all birds were killed …

Livability Of Leghorn Balut Embryos Stored Under Varying Temperatures And Storage Times, Joyce Jong, F. Dustan Clark

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

Baluts are fertile chicken or duck eggs that have been incubated and removed from the incubator prior to hatching for consumption. Chicken eggs are incubated for 11 to 14 days and duck eggs are incubated for 16 to 20 days. Baluts have an extremely specialized consumer market, with the majority of its consumers of Filipino decent. Current U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations for the storage of baluts prior to sale is 7.2ºC, the same as for infertile commercial table eggs. Consumer preference is to purchase live baluts for consumption. Since exposure to 7.2ºC causes embryo mortality within 8 hours of …

A Preliminary Investigation Of The Construct Of Psychopathic Personality (Psychopathy) In Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes), Scott O. Lilienfeld, Jonathan Gershon, Marshall Duke, Lori Marino, Frans B. M. De Waal

Sentience Collection

Although the construct of psychopathy has received considerable attention in humans, its relevance to other animals is largely unknown. We developed a measure of psychopathy for use in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), the Chimpanzee Psychopathy Measure (CPM), and asked 6 raters to complete this index on 34 chimpanzees. The CPM (a) demonstrated satisfactory interrater reliability and internal consistency; (b) exhibited marginally significant sex differences (males > females); (c) correlated positively with measures of extraversion, agreeableness, and observational ratings of agonism, sexual activity, daring behaviors, teasing, silent bluff displays, and temper tantrums, and negatively with observational ratings of generosity; and (d) demonstrated incremental …

Scale-Model Comprehension By Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes), Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Sarah T. Boysen, Kimberly L. Mukobi

Sentience Collection

The ability of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to recognize the correspondence between a scale model and its real-world referent was examined. In Experiments 1 and 2, an adult female and a young adult male watched as an experimenter hid a miniature model food in 1 of 4 sites in a scale model. Then, the chimpanzees were given the opportunity to find the real food item that had been hidden in the analogous location in the real room. The female performed significantly above chance, whereas the male performed at chance level. Experiments 3 and 4 tested 5 adult and 2 adolescent chimpanzees …

Overall Animal Welfare Assessment Reviewed. Part 1: Is It Possible?, M.B.M. Bracke, B. M. Spruijt, J.H.M. Metz

Assessment of Animal Welfare Collection

Several authors have concluded that scientists should not attempt to perform overall animal welfare assessment (OWA). They argue that scientists have continued to fail to make progress in this area and that value judgements are inherently involved in OWA for which science cannot provide answers. We take a more positive attitude toward OWA and argue that scientists should avoid creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. OWA is necessary for making actual moral and political decisions. Science has already accumulated much relevant information about welfare and this information should be applied in decision making.

The task of OW A is to assess welfare …

Overall Animal Welfare Reviewed. Part 2: Assessment Tables And Schemes, M.B.M. Bracke, J.H.M. Metz, B. M. Spruijt

Assessment of Animal Welfare Collection

In the scientific literature several attempts have been made to systematically assess the overall welfare-status of animals in relation to housing and management. This paper reviews assessment tables and schemes that have been constructed to this end. These tables and schemes have a tabular format that allows an assessment of housing systems using a list of welfare-relevant attributes (properties of the housing system). Rather than identifying deficits, the focus of this review is on finding positive recommendations for the purpose of developing a method for overall welfare assessment (OWA) on a scientific basis. The main recommendation is to use the …

Overall Animal Welfare Reviewed. Part 3: Welfare Assessment Based On Needs And Supported By Expert Opinion, M.B.M. Bracke, B. M. Spruijt, J.H.M. Metz

Assessment of Animal Welfare Collection

Welfare concerns what matters to animals from their point of view. What matters to animals is their state of need. Satisfaction and frustration of needs are associated with emotional states, the subjective experience of which directly determines the welfare status of an animal. Because emotional states are difficult to assess, overall welfare assessment (OWA) is best approached as an assessment of needs.

For actual OW A a list of needs must be formulated. Different authors have formulated different lists. From these lists a concept need-list was constructed. For validation the needs-based approach for OWA was discussed in interviews with experts …

Overcoming Response Bias Using Symbolic Representations Of Number By Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes), Sarah T. Boysen, Kimberly L. Mukobi, Gary G. Berntson

Sentience Collection

We previously reported that chimpanzees were unable to optimally select the smaller of two candy arrays in order to receive a larger reward. When Arabic numerals were substituted for the candy arrays, animals who had had prior training with numerical symbols showed an immediate and significant improvement in performance and were able to select reliably the smaller numeric representation in order to obtain a larger reward. Poor performance with candy arrays was interpreted as reflecting a response bias toward the intrinsic incentive and/or perceptual features of the larger array. In contrast, the Arabic numerals represent numerosity symbolically and appear to …

Observations And Possible Function Of The Striking Anterior Coloration Pattern Of Galathea Intermedia (Crustacea: Decapoda: Anomura), J. M. Hall-Spencer, P. G. Moore, L. U. Sneddon

Veterinary Science and Medicine Collection

Galathea intermedia is common, but cryptic, on Clyde maerl deposits where it lives in small groups of mixed sex and age, sharing shelters (typically dead Dosinia shells) to avoid predation. Its appearance is marked by six iridescent blue spots which may play an important role in intra- or interspecific interactions.

Arkansas Animal Science Department Report 1998, Stacey Gunter

Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station Research Series

No abstract provided.

Recent Documentation Of Mountain Lion (Puma Concolor) In Arkansas, Theo Witsell, Gary A. Heidt, Parker L. Dozhier, Tom Frothingham, Mark Lynn

Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Proximity On Landmark Use In Clark’S Nutcrackers, Kristy L. Gould-Beierle, Alan Kamil

Avian Cognition Papers

Clark’s nutcrackers, Nucifraga columbiana, store thousands of pine seeds during the autumn and retrieve them throughout the winter. It has been shown that these birds are able to use visual cues to relocate hidden food in the laboratory. In this set of experiments, we trained three groups of Clark’s nutcrackers to find a hidden food goal that was placed in the same spatial location relative to the testing room. During training, the location of two local cues in relation to the goal differed between the three groups. Group 1 learned the task with the cues closest to the goal, group …

Patterns Of Movement And Orientation During Caching And Recovery By Clark’S Nutcrackers, Nucifraga Columbiana, Alan Kamil, Russell P. Balda, Sally Good

Avian Cognition Papers

Clark’s nutcrackers regularly store large numbers of pine seeds and remember the locations of the cached seeds. Although they are very accurate, they do make some errors during recovery. In an attempt to determine whether any behaviours during caching predicted the occurrence of errors during recovery, we videotaped Clark’s nutcrackers while they cached and recovered seeds under laboratory conditions. We used the videotapes to develop complete, quantitative descriptions of caching and recovery behaviour, with an emphasis on body orientation and directions of movement. During caching, the birds showed the greatest change in their orientation and direction following cache creation. During …

How Do They, Indeed? A Reply To Biegler Et Al., Alan Kamil, Juli E. Jones

Avian Cognition Papers

We trained Clark’s nutcrackers, Nucifraga columbiana, to search halfway between two landmarks while varying the distance between the landmarks (Kamil & Jones 1997). We found that the birds learned the problem readily and generalized to novel interlandmark distances within the range of distances used during training. Unlike some other studies in which responses to proportional distance were obtained (e.g. O’Keefe & Burgess 1996; Tommasi et al. 1997), the nutcrackers showed very precise search and maintained this precision during the transfer test. The distributions of digging locations around the central position were concentrated within ±1–2 cm of the central location …

Geographic Variation In Alarm Calls Of Gunnison's Prairie Dogs, C. N. Slobodchikoff, S. H. Ackers, M. Van Ert

Communication Skills Collection

Geographic variation in alarm calls of Gunnison's prairie dogs (Cynomys gunnisoni) was analyzed at regional and local scales. Alarm calls in response to a common stimulus (the same human) were recorded at four colonies near Flagstaff, Arizona, and at six sites throughout the southwestern United States. The acoustic structure of calls was analyzed for seven call variables. Regional differences fit the prediction of greater differences with increased geographical separation. Differences between colonies at a local scale were not related to geographical distance, suggesting that local dialects exist within a region. Differences in the level of predation by humans …

Evolution And Animal Welfare, Marian Stamp Dawkins

Assessment of Animal Welfare Collection

Animal welfare is a topic often thought to reside outside mainstream biology. The complexity of the methods used to assess welfare (such as health, physiology, immunological state, and behavior) require an understanding of a wide range of biological phenomena. Furthermore, the "welfare" of an animal provides a framework in which a diversity of its responses can be understood as fitness-enhancing mechanisms. Different methods for assessing animal welfare are discussed, with particular emphasis on the role of an animal's own choices and reinforcement mechanisms. No part of biology is as yet able to explain consciousness, but by confronting the possibility that …

Fmri Of Monkey Visual Cortex, Lisa Stefanacci, Paul Reber, Jennifer Costanza, Eric Wong, Richard Buxton, Stuart Zola, Larry R. Squire, Thomas D. Albright

Neurology Collection

While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is now used widely for demonstrating neural activity-related signals associated with perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes in humans, to date this technique has not been developed for use with nonhuman primates. fMRI in monkeys offers a potentially valuable experimental approach for investigating brain function, which will complement and aid existing techniques such as electrophysiology and the behavioral analysis of the effects of brain lesions. There are, however, a number of significant technical challenges involved in using fMRI with monkeys. Here, we describe the procedures by which we have overcome these challenges to …

A Comparison Of Encephalization Between Odontocete Cetaceans And Anthropoid Primates, L. Marino

Veterinary Science and Medicine Collection

There have been very few studies of brain size and encephalization in cetaceans and essentially none that have made direct quantitative comparisons of cetaceans and another mammalian group using large normative samples. In the present study two different measures of encephalization were calculated and used to rank and compare 21 odontocete species and 60 anthropoid primate species. Comparisons were made both within and between the two groups. Results show that the encephalization level of Homo sapiens is still extraordinary relative to that of nonhuman species. Nevertheless, a subset of delphinid odontocetes are significantly more highly encephalized than the most highly …

Production Practices Of Arkansas Beef Cattle Producers, Michael P. Popp, Lucas D. Parsch

AAES Research Reports and Research Bulletins

This report contains information from a 1996 survey on production practices of Arkansas beef cattle producers. While several studies have been completed on the profitability of retained ownership of beef cattle, few empirical data are available on production practices of cow/calf and stocker operations in Arkansas. This report shows that there are some differences in production methods across operation types. Further, the report summarizes demographic characteristics of Arkansas cow/calf and stocker operations. The results of this study can be particularly helpful in providing the needed data for studying the potential economic impact of feeding weaned calves to heavier weights in …

‘Pleasures’, ‘Pains’ And Animal Welfare: Toward A Natural History Of Affect, D. Fraser, I. J.H. Duncan

Animal Welfare Collection

In hedonic theories of motivation, 'motivational affective states' (MASs) are typically seen as adaptations which motivate certain types of behaviour, especially in situations where a flexible or learned response is more adaptive than a rigid or reflexive one. MASs can be negative (eg unpleasant feelings of hunger or pain) or positive (eg pleasant feelings associated with eating and playing). Hedonic theories often portray negative and positive MASs as opposite ends of a one-dimensional scale.

We suggest that natural selection has favoured negative and positive affect as separate processes to solve two different types of motivational problems. We propose that negative …

Total Grazing Management : Results And Observations From The Pimbee Station Trial, Damien Pearce, Geoff Elliott, Robert Rouda

Agriculture reports

The major aim of the trial was to assess the effectiveness of permanent trapyards as a system for managing total grazing pressure. Permanent trapyards potentially offer a cost-effective system of controlling domestic stock, feral goats and kangaroos.

Vocal Response Of Piglets To Weaning: Effect Of Piglet Age, Daniel M. Weary, David Fraser

Ontogeny Collection

Piglets vocalize a great deal during the first few days after weaning. The aim of this experiment was to determine if the calls given by piglets vary in response to one factor thought to influence post-weaning adaptation: weaning age. In 22 litters, each containing a minimum of 9 piglets, 3 piglets were weaned under identical conditions at 3, 4 and 5 weeks of age. Vocalizations and weight gain were monitored for the week after weaning. The number of calls produced by piglets of all three ages declined from an average of 8.2 calls/min per piglet on the day of weaning …