Impact of domestication on learning and cognitive capacities in goats (Capra hircus): effects of long-term cognitive training on livestock welfare and husbandry
Final Report Abstract
To adjust husbandry systems to animal needs and abilities, we need to have good knowledge on the learning and cognitive processes of farmed animals, as well as which factors contribute to the variation in these traits. During husbandry practise, it is crucial for animals to be able to adapt to novel situations, while otherwise stress level due to frustration might decrease welfare. In this project, we found that both, dwarf and dairy goats were able to learn a novel rewarded contingency equally well, i.e. to adapt to a new context, while dwarf goats performed better in the reversal learning phase compared to dairy goats, hinting a higher ability to adapt to changing contexts (WPI). A selection for high production performance might thus be associated with decreased behavioural flexibility, at least in goats. This could affect the ability of specific breeds to adapt to new environments and could thus lead to welfare problems. Next to learning, the comprehension of the physical and social environment plays a key role to better understand how animal perceive and interact in their world. Using a comprehensive cognitive test battery assessing the use of physical and social cues, we investigated whether domestication (wild goats vs domestic goats) and/or selection objective (dwarf vs dairy goats) affected the performance of goats in this test battery. Contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find difference between wild, dwarf and dairy goats, regardless of the stimuli that were presented (physical and social; WPII). This is an important novel finding, as other comparative research, mainly conducted on canids, shows strong differences between wild and domestic animals, at least in the social domain. The results of WPII highlights that physical and social cognition in goats might not be majorly affected by domestication or the selection for specific breeding objectives. However, it must be taken into account that this WP was carried out with only very few animals in case of the wild goats. Goats, as group-living animals, could also adapt to new contexts by learning from others, either from other goats or human handlers. By using a task that requires operant manipulation of an apparatus (i.e. sliding a door) to access food, we were able to test whether goats would imitate/emulate the behaviour of a demonstrator. Interestingly, neither goat nor human demonstrators had a strong impact on the problem-solving behaviour of both, dwarf and dairy goats (WPIII). Consistent with other literature, it appears that goats appear to favour individual compared to social learning in a foodrelated context. In the final WP, we assessed the impact of long-term cognitive training on behavioural flexibility and stress reactivity as well as the intrinsic motivation of domestic goats to participate in cognitively challenging tasks. Our results suggest that long-term experience with standardized cognitive testing does not appear to notably affect the performance and stress reactivity in subsequent cognitive or stress tests, in goats (WPIV.1). On one hand, we show that cognitive testing did not impair welfare (in terms of stress reactivity) and did not bias results in subsequent cognitive tasks (in term of behavioural flexibility). On the other hand, it questions whether the routine assessment of animal cognitive traits via cognitive testing is perceived as (cognitive) enrichment by the animals. In any case, however, goats seem to be motivated to solve a task despite food being freely available (WPIV.2), a behaviour described as contrafreeloading, stressing the need for the provision of cognitive challenges to improve the welfare of farm animals. On a final note, in most of our experiments, we found that variability induced by differences in phenotype and research site can be considerably greater than the effect of treatments or test conditions. We therefore suggest that further cognitive research should conduct multi-lab studies to control for idiosyncrasies on single sites.
Publications
- (2019) Farm animal cognition: Linking behaviour, welfare and ethics. Frontiers in Veterinary Science 6: 24
Nawroth, C., Langbein, J., Coulon, M., Gabor, V., Oesterwind, S., Benz-Schwarzburg, J., von Borell, E.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2019.00024) - (2020) Current state of knowledge on the cognitive capacities of goats and its potential to inform species-specific enrichment. Small Ruminant Research 192: 106208
Zobel, G., Nawroth, C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smallrumres.2020.106208) - (2020) Goats work for food in a Contrafreeloading task. Scientific Reports 10: 22336
Rosenberger, K., Simmler, M., Nawroth, C., Langbein, J., Keil, N.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78931-w) - (2020). EasieRR: An open-source software for noninvasive heart rate variability assessment. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 11: 773-782
Rasmussen, J.H., Rosenberger, K., Langbein, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13393) - (2021) Performance in cognitive tasks is not affected by long-term cognitive test exposure in conceptually different tests. Royal Society Open Science 8: 210656
Rosenberger, K., Simmler, M., Langbein, J., Keil, N., Nawroth, C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210656) - (2021) The legislative, ethical, and conceptual importance of replicability in farm animal welfare science. Animal Behavior and Cognition 8(2): 247–250
Nawroth, C., Gygax, L.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.26451/abc.08.02.11.2021) - (2022) Goats (Capra hircus) from different selection lines differ in their behavioural flexibility. Frontiers in Psychology 12: 796464
Nawroth, C., Rosenberger, K., Keil, N., Langbein, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.796464) - (2022) Responsiveness of domesticated goats towards various stressors following long-term cognitive test exposure. PeerJ 5: e3073
Rosenberger, K., Simmler, M., Langbein, J., Nawroth, C., Keil, N.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3073)
