Is out of sight out of mind? The effects of resource cues on motivation in mink, Mustela vison

doi:10.1006/anbe.2003.2097

Animal Behaviour

Volume 65, Issue 4, April 2003, Pages 755-762

https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.2003.2097 Get rights and content

Abstract

Measuring strength of preference is a powerful tool in welfare research. However, animals' preferences in so-called demand experiments may be influenced by stimuli from the test resources (e.g. olfactory or visual cues), leading to motivations different from those of the ‘applied’ animals who are not so exposed. Resource cues could act as eliciting stimuli, enhancing motivation, or they could supply information so that working for closer access to a resource becomes redundant. We assessed the priorities of mink in both a typical closed economy demand set-up (Cues, i.e. resource cues present when preference is expressed) and one where resource cues were distant and screened at the choice point (No Cues). Six mink were tested in both treatments, and their motivation to reach four resources (Food, Bath, Unpredictable Social Contact, Toy) was assessed via their responses to increased access costs (weighted doors). Of five measures, only the maximum price paid was unaffected by treatment. For the other four measures, cue availability affected the motivation to reach some resources but not others: there were significant treatment×resource effects on baseline visit rate, visit elasticity and consumer surplus, and a similar but nonsignificant trend for expenditure rate. The rank order of preferences was also affected by treatment: Food was most preferred in both treatments, but motivation for Toys and possibly also Unpredictable Social Contact declined in the No Cues treatment. This result has implications for the mink welfare debate and also for the design of valid preference experiments. We suggest that different designs and measures of motivation vary in their suitability for addressing the two types of applied questions that use motivational data. Copyright 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.

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The high motivation for social interaction is in accordance with the observation that domesticated ferrets are gregarious and will sleep together, share food and water and play vigorously (Fisher, 2006; Lloyd, 1999). In addition, Warburton and Mason (2003) found that mink (Mustela vison), a close relative of the ferret with similar biologic characteristics, worked to gain access to conspecifics from which they were separated by a wired fence. An alternative hypothesis might be that the ferrets were highly motivated to visit the social chamber in order to gather information on the potential competitors in their territory (Chang et al., 2000; Takahashi, 1991).
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Providing captive foxes with relevant enrichment objects may support their ability to cope with barren housing systems and thus have positive welfare effects. The relevance of enrichment objects is, among others, related to animals’ preference that should be examined prior to supplementing their housing environment. In this study, we assessed 30 juvenile, singly housed silver foxes’ short-term preference for five different oral enrichment objects based on their immediate use of the objects when they were given simultaneous access after one week of deprivation. Also, wear and tear after one week of continuous access was assessed as a measure of use and to estimate the robustness and durability of various objects. A cattle femur bone was clearly the first ranked object (P ≤ 0.05), followed by a rawhide bone, a mutual pulling device mounted between neighbouring cages, and straw and a plastic cube as the least used objects. All of the objects were, to a various degree, gnawed by the foxes. After one week of use, about 30% of the cattle bone mass was consumed, compared to about 88% of the rawhide bone mass. Although the plastic cubes were almost indestructible and therefore durable objects their low ranking do not necessarily make them good enrichment objects for foxes. Offering meat bones to captive foxes provide the animals with biologically relevant stimuli that elicit oral manipulation and play, behaviours with potential rewarding effects to the animals.
Feeding Time and Agonistic Behavior in Horses: Influence of Distance, Proportion, and Height of Troughs
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Horses express social-based organizations when grouped and also show conflicts over resources, which can progress to agonistic interactions. The domestication led horses to be fed in confinement, which may have had increased the competition for food. We tested whether the distance, height of positioning, and proportion of feeding troughs affect the agonistic behavior in horses, and whether such effects are influenced by the social stability. We simultaneously varied these three factors at two levels (eight treatments). The group of horses (n = 8) was subjected to all treatments in a primary phase (no previous experience of feeding ration together) and in a secondary phase (social relationships better established by the agonistic interactions in the primary phase). In each treatment, we recorded agonistic behaviors during 30 minutes while horses were feeding. A distance of 10 m and a height of 0.71 m of the troughs reduced kick behavior, regardless of the phases evaluated. For agonistic signaling pinned back ears behavior, initially, a far distance (10 m), low positioning (0 m of height), and a greater proportion of feeding troughs (1.5 per horse) reduced this behavior. However, in the secondary phase, the effect of distance was consistent, but the effects of height positioning and proportion were opposite. Moreover, pinned back ears was the most frequent agonistic behavior. We conclude that the effect of height and proportion of troughs on agonistic behaviors of horses may depend of the social stability, whereas a far distance between troughs reduces the most frequent agonistic behavior, regardless of such social homeostasis.
Workaholic ferrets: Does a two-chamber consumer demand study give insight in the preferences of laboratory ferrets (Mustela putorius furo)?
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Although provision of environmental enrichment is an effective tool to refine laboratory animal experiments, it is currently unknown which enrichments ferrets prefer. This study aimed to assess the suitability of a closed economy, two-chamber consumer demand set-up to determine ferrets’ preferences for selected enrichments. Twelve female ferrets were housed in a set-up consisting of a home and enrichment chamber (EC) connected by a weighted door. The maximum weights the ferrets pushed for food (MPP_food) and an empty chamber (MPP_empty) were determined to evaluate the maximum push capacity of the animals and as a control. Although the ferrets pushed significantly more for food (1325 ± 213 g) than for the empty chamber (1169 ± 193 g), the weight difference was minor (MPP_empty was 89 ± 13% of MPP_food). To evaluate the ferrets’ underlying motivation to push for the empty chamber, a second study was performed in which MPP_empty was tested in seven alternative set-ups. The first three set-ups included adapted versions of the standard design (set-up A₁, A₂ and A₃), intended to determine the functional value of the empty chamber. The four other set-ups (set-up B₀, B₁, B₃, B₄) aimed to evaluate the attractiveness of the door elements by allowing the ferrets to choose whether or not to use the weighted door to enter EC. Results demonstrated no significant differences in MPP_empty between the A-set-ups, indicating that the value of the empty chamber could not be reduced by adapting the set-up. MPP_empty reduced when allowing the ferrets free access to EC, demonstrating that the empty chamber had reinforcing properties. Nevertheless, the ferrets were still motivated to use the weighted door despite being granted free access to EC, indicating that the door also has reinforcing properties. The ferrets decreased the use of the weighted door most when, in a set-up with free access to EC, the nest box in the home cage (53 ± 22% of MPP_food) was replaced by a manipulable plastic bucket (26 ± 13% of MPP_food). These results indicate that availability of items in the home chamber may influence the results, which should be taken into account when designing motivation studies similar to the one performed in this study. The lack of differences between MPP_food and MPP_empty furthermore demonstrates that the two-chamber set-up is not suitable for evaluating the ferrets’ motivation for enrichments, thus necessitating other alternatives, such as a three- or multi-chamber consumer demand study, to be explored.
Conditioned place preference or aversion as animal welfare assessment tools: Limitations in their application
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This changes the situation from an animal that has to cope because it has no access to food to an animal that is aware that additional food is available (even if they must work to get it). In addition, sensory cues from the food, such as sight and smell, may increase the motivation to feed, while without the cues, this motivation may remain low (i.e. ‘out of sight is out of mind’, Warburton and Mason, 2003). Thus, (i) the potential to obtain additional food is in itself likely to increase feeding motivation and (ii) once the first food has been consumed motivation may be increased as a result of positive feedback (Day et al., 1997), until at least a state of satiety is reached.
Conditioned place preference (CPP) or aversion (CPA) methods are potentially useful tools in animal welfare assessment because they permit measurement of the reinforcing properties of a stimulus in the absence of the stimulus itself. We used CPP/CPA techniques in a series of experiments to assess the preference of food restricted broiler breeders for increased food quantities or avoidance of aversive stimuli. In all experiments, 6–10 week old Ross308 pairs of broiler breeders were housed in pens divided in half. Pen sides were visually differentiated and birds were trained with different stimuli on each pen side, correcting for possible side biases, either different food amounts for CPP or aversive stimuli on one pen side and none, or ‘neutral’, on the other, for CPA. To test if a preference for a pen side had been formed, the pen divider was removed when no stimulus was present and the amount of time birds spent on each pen side was recorded. Each experiment had a factorial treatment structure (n = 10 replicate pens per treatment combination) and the proportions of time spent by birds on the ‘positive’ pen side (i.e. increased food amount for CPP or ‘neutral’ for CPA) were analysed. In experiment 1 on CPP (180 birds forming 90 pairs), three different training regimes in combination with three different testing methods were trialled: whilst during training of all birds, on one pen side the birds received the commercially recommended, restricted amount of food (R) and on the other pen side they received twice that amount (2R) (no food was present during testing). In experiment 2 (110 birds forming 40 pairs and 10 individually housed) and 3 (80 birds forming 40 pairs), further refinements were made to the experimental methods and birds were allocated to CPP treatments with food amounts 2R or 3R (vs. R) or to CPA treatments, ‘social isolation’ or ‘unpredictable wind’. Overall, there was no evidence of aversion at testing to the pen sides with aversive stimuli during training and little evidence of preference at testing for the pen sides with increased food amounts during training. Furthermore, where statistical significance was achieved for CPP the preferences shown were very small. The most consistent result was a strong preference for the pen side birds were not previously housed on immediately before each test (P < 0.001 in all experiments). It appeared that birds were motivated to explore a location where they had not just been housed in an attempt to find food and this motivation seemed to overshadow other effects. This series of experiments demonstrates some limitations of CPP/CPA techniques for welfare assessment and the learning problems experienced by chronically food restricted animals.

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^f1: Correspondence: H. Warburton, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PS, U.K. (email:[email protected] ).

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