Long-Term Socialization with Humans Affects Human-Directed Behavior in Goats

Abstract

Throughout their evolutionary history, humans have tried to domesticate a variety of wild terrestrial mammals, resulting in a limited number that has been successfully domesticated. Among these domesticated species, domestic goats (Capra aegagrus hircus) are a useful model species to study the effects of ontogenesis on the socio-cognitive abilities of domestic non-companion animals in their interactions with humans. To this end, the behavioral responses of two groups of goats with a different background of human socialization (high and low socialization) were compared in the impossible task test, an experimental paradigm aimed to study socio-cognitive skills and the tendency to interact with humans. Our results show that, when the task became impossible to solve, goats with a higher level of socialization interacted with the experimenter for a greater amount of time than subjects in the low socialization group, whereas the latter group exhibited increased door directed behavior. Overall, highly socialized goats made more social contact with humans compared to the other group in the impossible task paradigm.

Red Junglefowl Chicks Seek Contact With Humans During Foraging Task

“…We measured how often birds, that had been exposed to positive human interactions during their development, approached and looked at human experimenters during a foraging task. This is a similar behavioral response as reported in other species as human contact seeking (Malavasi and Huber, 2016 ; Nawroth et al, 2016 ; Langbein et al, 2018 ; Mastellone et al, 2020 ). Then, we related variation in this behavior to individual birds‘ learning ability, amount of human handling received and their behavior in a novel arena test.…”

“…As we could not use camera recordings to precisely record gaze direction and duration of eye-contact, we did not score or analyze looking at human as a separate response, but only in combination with approaches. However, merely approaches have also been used to measure contact seeking (e.g., Mastellone et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Looking at the experimenter was included in our measure of contact-seeking behavior, similar to other studies (e.g., Miklósi et al, 2003Miklósi et al, , 2005Malavasi and Huber, 2016;Nawroth et al, 2016;Mastellone et al, 2020). Direct eye contact is a powerful stimulus for most animals, including birds, which usually elicits flight and anti-predator responses (e.g., Rosa-Salva et al, 2007;Clucas et al, 2013).…”

“…In general, behaviors such as approaching, and looking at another individual (also humans) are considered to be carried out with the intention of making contact with that individual. Approach to, and looking at, have therefore been used to measure contact-seeking in a range of species (e.g., Miklósi et al, 2003 , 2005 ; Malavasi and Huber, 2016 ; Nawroth et al, 2016 ; Mastellone et al, 2020 ), and contact-seeking behavior has an important role for understanding heterospecific communication.…”

How Can Cattle Be Toilet Trained? Incorporating Reflexive Behaviours into a Behavioural Chain

“…The behaviours recorded in Part 3 are shown in an ethogram ( Table 1 ). Intraobserver reliability was examined by re-coding 25% of the videos from Phase 3.2 by the original observer [ 45 , 46 ] because this was the phase including the complete behavioural sequences. Cohen’s kappa was calculated with the routine included in The Observer® XT13 software with κ = 0.91 for the frequency, with regard to the sequence of events over all observed behaviours.…”