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The effect of access to a well-resourced environment on dairy calves' cognition and affective states

Suchon, Malina

This study aimed to explore the effect of environmental complexity on the ability of dairy calves to discriminate between conspecifics and on their sensitivity to reward. Calves were housed either in 1) pair housing for 22.5 h/d with 1.5 h of daily access to a well-resourced pen which included 3 other calves and physical devices (enriched calves, n=6 pairs) or 2) pair housing for 24 h/d (control calves, n=6 pairs). After 10 d of housing treatment, calves were trained to discriminate between 2 calves in a Y-maze over 20 d. Twelve of the 24 calves tested met the learning criterion and treatment did not affect the number of sessions needed to reach the learning criterion. Calves were then subjected to a Successive Negative Contrast test during which they were trained to approach a milk reward over 3 trials/day for 3 days. On the last training day, latencies of enriched calves increased over daily trials while control calves were faster and remained relatively consistent, suggesting a greater sensitivity to reward. Starting on day 4, the reward was reduced for the 5 following test days. On test days, calves’ latencies to reach the reward increased across daily trials but no effect of treatment or days was found. Our findings suggest that calves can discriminate among individuals but learning performance did not differ between treatments. Calves raised in standard pair housing showed increased sensitivity to reward, supporting they may experience a more negative emotional state in comparison to calves reared with temporary access to a well-resourced environment

Dataset

University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0447239

https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/TKH4WT

Dataverse