Abstract: Effective and safe monitoring techniques are needed by U.S. land managers to understand free-roaming horse behavior and habitat use and to aid in making informed management decisions. Global positioning system (GPS) and very high frequency (VHF) radio collars can be used to provide high spatial and temporal resolution information for detecting free-roaming horse movement. GPS and VHF collars are a common tool used in wildlife management, but have rarely been used for free-roaming horse research and monitoring in the United States. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the design, safety, and detachment device on GPS/VHF collars used to collect free-roaming horse location and movement data. Between 2009 and 2010, 28 domestic and feral horses were marked with commercial and custom designed VHF/GPS collars. Individual horses were evaluated for damage caused by the collar placement, and following initial observations, collar design was modified to reduce the potential for injury. After collar modifications, which included the addition of collar length adjustments to both sides of the collar allowing for better alignment of collar and neck shapes, adding foam padding to the custom collars to replicate the commercial collar foam padding, and repositioning the detachment device to reduce wear along the jowl, we observed little to no evidence of collar wear on horses. Neither custom-built nor commercial collars caused injury to study horses, however, most of the custom-built collars failed to collect data. During the evaluation of collar detachment devices, we had an 89% success rate of collar devices detaching correctly. This study showed that free-roaming horses can be safely marked with GPS and/or VHF collars with minimal risk of injury, and that these collars can be a useful tool for monitoring horses without creating a risk to horse health and wellness.

Abstract: In non-human animals, creative behaviour occurs spontaneously only at low frequencies, so is typically missed by standardised observational methods. Experimental approaches have tended to rely overly on paradigms from child development or adult human cognition, which may be inappropriate for species that inhabit very different perceptual worlds and possess quite different motor capacities than humans. The analysis of anecdotes offers a solution to this impasse, provided certain conditions are met. To be reliable, anecdotes must be recorded immediately after observation, and only the records of scientists experienced with the species and the individuals concerned should be used. Even then, interpretation of a single record is always ambiguous, and analysis is feasible only when collation of multiple records shows that a behaviour pattern occurs repeatedly under similar circumstances. This approach has been used successfully to study a number of creative capacities of animals: the distribution, nature and neural correlates of deception across the primate order; the occurrence of teaching in animals; and the neural correlates of several aptitudes--in birds, foraging innovation, and in primates, innovation, social learning and tool-use. Drawing on these approaches, we describe the use of this method to investigate a new problem, the cognition of the African elephant, a species whose sheer size and evolutionary distance from humans renders the conventional methods of comparative psychology of little use. The aim is both to chart the creative cognitive capacities of this species, and to devise appropriate experimental methods to confirm and extend previous findings.

Abstract: Monkeys readily learn to discriminate between rewarded and unrewarded items or actions by observing their conspecifics. However, they do not systematically learn from humans. Understanding what makes human-to-monkey transmission of knowledge work or fail could help identify mediators and moderators of social learning that operate regardless of language or culture, and transcend inter-species differences. Do monkeys fail to learn when human models show a behavior too dissimilar from the animals' own, or when they show a faultless performance devoid of error? To address this question, six rhesus macaques trained to find which object within a pair concealed a food reward were successively tested with three models: a familiar conspecific, a 'stimulus-enhancing' human actively drawing the animal's attention to one object of the pair without actually performing the task, and a 'monkey-like' human performing the task in the same way as the monkey model did. Reward was manipulated to ensure that all models showed equal proportions of errors and successes. The 'monkey-like' human model improved the animals' subsequent object discrimination learning as much as a conspecific did, whereas the 'stimulus-enhancing' human model tended on the contrary to retard learning. Modeling errors rather than successes optimized learning from the monkey and 'monkey-like' models, while exacerbating the adverse effect of the 'stimulus-enhancing' model. These findings identify error modeling as a moderator of social learning in monkeys that amplifies the models' influence, whether beneficial or detrimental. By contrast, model-observer similarity in behavior emerged as a mediator of social learning, that is, a prerequisite for a model to work in the first place. The latter finding suggests that, as preverbal infants, macaques need to perceive the model as 'like-me' and that, once this condition is fulfilled, any agent can become an effective model.

Abstract: One of the most important human social skills is the ability to recognize faces. Humans recognize familiar faces easily, and can learn to identify unfamiliar faces from repeatedly presented images. Sheep are social animals that can recognize other sheep as well as familiar humans. Little is known, however, about their holistic face-processing abilities. In this study, we trained eight sheep (Ovis aries) to recognize the faces of four celebrities from photographic portraits displayed on computer screens. After training, the sheep chose the 'learned-familiar' faces rather than the unfamiliar faces significantly above chance. We then tested whether the sheep could recognize the four celebrity faces if they were presented in different perspectives. This ability has previously been shown only in humans. Sheep successfully recognized the four celebrity faces from tilted images. Interestingly, there was a drop in performance with the tilted images (from 79.22 ± 7.5% to 66.5 ± 4.1%) of a magnitude similar to that seen when humans perform this task. Finally, we asked whether sheep could recognize a very familiar handler from photographs. Sheep identified the handler in 71.8 ± 2.3% of the trials without pretraining. Together these data show that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, comparable with those of humans and non-human primates.