Personality Research in Mammalian Farm Animals: Concepts, Measures, and Relationship to Welfare

Abstract

Measuring and understanding personality in animals is a rising scientific field. Much research has been conducted to assess distinctive individual differences in behavior in a large number of species in the past few decades, and increasing numbers of studies include farm animals. Nevertheless, the terminology and definitions used in this broad scientific field are often confusing because different concepts and methods are used to explain often synonymously applied terms, such as personality, temperament and coping style. In the present review we give a comprehensive overview of the concepts and terms currently used in animal personality research and critically reveal how they are defined and what they measure. First, we shortly introduce concepts describing human personality and how these concepts are used to explain animal personality. Second, we present which concepts, methods and measures are applied in farm animal personality research and show that the terminology used seems to be somehow species-related. Finally, we discuss some findings on the possible impact of personality on the welfare of farm animals. The assessment of personality in farm animals is of growing scientific and practical interest. Differences in theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches may also entail the diverse use of the different concepts between basic and applied research approaches. We conclude that more consistency is needed in using different theoretical concepts, terms and measures, especially in farm animal personality research. The terms coping style and temperament, which are used in different ways, should not be examined as independent concepts, but rather should be considered as different aspects of the whole personality concept. Farm animal personality should be increasingly considered for the improvement of animal housing, management, breeding and welfare.

Review: Early life predisposing factors for biting in pigs

“…The relationship between aggressiveness and personality traits measured in tests other than the backtest has less often been investigated. The response in the human approach test, commonly used to assess fear tendency (Finkemeier et al, 2018), was poorly correlated (Scheffler et al, 2016a) or not correlated (Janczak et al, 2003) with aggressiveness observed in rearing pens. Gilts classified as low or high responders after several behavioural tests (including restraint, handling, sudden human approach) did not differ in their number of attacks towards other gilts in a food competition test (Lawrence et al, 1991).…”

“…Background. Personality is defined by a correlated set of individual behavioural and physiological traits that are consistent over lifetime and environmental contexts (Finkemeier et al, 2018). In humans, personality is described by five main dimensions.…”

“…Animals are classified as proactive (also referred to as 'active' or 'high resisting') when they have a strong fight/flight response, and reactive (also referred to as 'passive' or 'low resisting') when they have a low response. Personality and coping style are closely linked (Korte et al, 2005;Finkemeier et al, 2018). Indeed, proactive animals are considered to be more aggressive towards conspecifics, more exploratory, bold and active compared with reactive individuals.…”

Pre-Exposure to an Electrical Stimulus Primes Associative Pairing of Audio and Electrical Stimuli for Dairy Heifers in a Virtual Fencing Feed Attractant Trial

“…In addition to prior experiences, temperament may affect cognitive processes through its influence on emotional state, and consequently attention, memory and judgement [15,21]. For example, fearfulness (i.e., high emotional arousal to a challenging situation; Finkemeier et al [22]) is a feature of animal temperament [23][24][25] that has been associated with impaired learning in calves [26]. Fear can be induced by unpleasant events that are sudden, unfamiliar, unpredictable and inconsistent with expectations [27].…”

Influences of Personality on Ungulate Migration and Management

“…In our study populations of elk, the apparent importance of predation risk to the occurrence of behavioral types made it surprising that we found a similar gradient of shy through bold individuals in a captive elk population, where predators were effectively absent and forage was uniformly available (Found and St. Clair, 2016). Evidence of personality is similarly apparent for several domestic species (Finkemeier et al, 2018), many of which are also protected from natural predators. More generally, behavioral types appear to result from complex geneenvironment interactions that involve multiple, pleiotropic genes (Bouchard and Loehlin, 2001;Krueger et al, 2008) that persist in all populations owing to variable or changing environments (Dingemanse et al, 2007) and both frequency and densitydependent effects (Aplin et al, 2014;Nicolaus et al, 2016).…”