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López-Bao, J. V., Sazatornil, V., Llaneza, L., & Rodríguez, A. (2013). Indirect Effects on Heathland Conservation and Wolf Persistence of Contradictory Policies that Threaten Traditional Free-Ranging Horse Husbandry. Conservation Letters, 6(6), 448–455.
Abstract: Abstract Conservation agencies within the European Union promote the restoration of traditional land uses as a cost-effective way to preserve biodiversity outside reserves. Although the European Union pursues the integration of the environment into strategic decision-making, it also dictates sectoral policies that may damage farmland biodiversity. We illustrate this point by outlining the socioeconomic factors that allow the persistence of traditional free-ranging horse husbandry in Galicia, northwestern Spain. Free-ranging Galician mountain ponies provide ecological and socioeconomic services including the prevention of forest fires, the maintenance of heathlands and wolves, and the attenuation of wolf-human conflicts. This traditional livestock system may have persisted because it entails negligible costs for farmers. Wolf predation upon Galician mountain ponies does not threaten farmer's economies and seems to be tolerated better than attacks to more valuable stock. Recently, European Union's regulations on animal welfare, carcass management, or meat production put new economic and administrative burdens on farmers, make free-ranging horse rearing economically unsustainable, and incentivize its abandonment. The aim of the European Union to integrate environmental policies may be successful to preserve farmland biodiversity only through careful anticipation of the side effects of apparently unrelated regulations on the fragile equilibrium that sustain traditional land uses.
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Devinsky, O., Boesch, J. M., Cerda-Gonzalez, S., Coffey, B., Davis, K., Friedman, D., et al. (2018). A cross-species approach to disorders affecting brain and behaviour. Nature Reviews Neurology, .
Abstract: Structural and functional elements of biological systems are highly conserved across vertebrates. Many neurological and psychiatric conditions affect both humans and animals. A cross-species approach to the study of brain and behaviour can advance our understanding of human disorders via the identification of unrecognized natural models of spontaneous disorders, thus revealing novel factors that increase vulnerability or resilience, and via the assessment of potential therapies. Moreover, diagnostic and therapeutic advances in human neurology and psychiatry can often be adapted for veterinary patients. However, clinical and research collaborations between physicians and veterinarians remain limited, leaving this wealth of comparative information largely untapped. Here, we review pain, cognitive decline syndromes, epilepsy, anxiety and compulsions, autoimmune and infectious encephalitides and mismatch disorders across a range of animal species, looking for novel insights with translational potential. This comparative perspective can help generate novel hypotheses, expand and improve clinical trials and identify natural animal models of disease resistance and vulnerability.
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Gille, C., Hoischen-Taubner, S., & Spiller, A. (2011). Neue Reitsportmotive jenseits des klassischen Turniersports. Sportwissenschaft, 41(1), 34–43.
Abstract: Während die traditionellen Pferdesportdisziplinen Dressur- und Springreiten Mitglieder verlieren, haben sich weitere Pferdesportarten in Deutschland etabliert und erfreuen sich wachsender Beliebtheit. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit den Hintergründen dieser Entwicklung. In einer empirischen Untersuchung wurden 1814 Reiter zu ihren Reitmotiven befragt. Mit Hilfe von Hauptkomponenten- und Clusteranalyse wurde eine Typologie gebildet, die ein differenziertes Bild der Motive verschiedener Reitergruppen ermöglicht. Während die leistungsorientierten Reiter eher in klassischen Reitsportdisziplinen vertreten sind, dominieren in moderneren Reitsportdisziplinen vor allem Genussmotive. Insgesamt entwickelt sich der Trend im Reitsport deutlich vom Drill in der Reitbahn hin zu mehr Entspannung, Erholung und Selbstverwirklichung. Der Wunsch, in der Freizeit Leistung zu bringen, sich mit anderen zu messen und Erfolg zu haben, ist nur noch für einen kleineren Teil der Pferdesportler bedeutsam. Aus der Verteilung der Motive ergeben sich neue Herausforderungen für den organisierten Reitsport, um den Spagat zwischen den Anforderungen der leistungsorientierten Sportreiter und den Erholungssuchenden zu meistern.
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Bücheler, T., & Sieg, J. H. (2011). Understanding Science 2.0: Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation in the Scientific Method. Proceedings of the 2nd European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition 2011 (FET 11), 7, 327–329.
Abstract: The innovation process is currently undergoing significant change in many industries. The World Wide Web has created a virtual world of collective intelligence and helped large groups of people connect and collaborate in the innovation process [1]. Von Hippel [2], for instance, states that a large number of users of a given technology will come up with innovative ideas. This process, originating in business, is now also being observed in science. Discussions around “Citizen Science” [3] and “Science 2.0” [4] suggest the same effects are relevant for fundamental research practices. “Crowdsourcing” [5] and “Open Innovation” [6] as well as other names for those paradigms, like Peer Production, Wikinomics, Swarm Intelligence etc., have become buzzwords in recent years. However, serious academic research efforts have also been started in many disciplines. In essence, these buzzwords all describe a form of collective intelligence that is enabled by new technologies, particularly internet connectivity. The focus of most current research on this topic is in the for-profit domain, i.e. organizations willing (and able) to pay large sums to source innovation externally, for instance through innovation contests. Our research is testing the applicability of Crowdsourcing and some techniques from Open Innovation to the scientific method and basic science in a non-profit environment (e.g., a traditional research university). If the tools are found to be useful, this may significantly change how some research tasks are conducted: While large, apriori unknown crowds of “irrational agents” (i.e. humans) are used to support scientists (and teams thereof) in several research tasks through the internet, the usefulness and robustness of these interactions as well as scientifically important factors like quality and validity of research results are tested in a systematic manner. The research is highly interdisciplinary and is done in collaboration with scientists from sociology, psychology, management science, economics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. After a pre-study, extensive data collection has been conducted and the data is currently being analyzed. The paper presents ideas and hypotheses and opens the discussion for further input.
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Quaresmini, C., Forrester, G. S., Spiezio, C., & Vallortigara, G. (2014). Social environment elicits lateralized behaviors in gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 128(3), 276–284.
Abstract: The influence of the social environment on lateralized behaviors has now been investigated across a wide variety of animal species. New evidence suggests that the social environment can modulate behavior. Currently, there is a paucity of data relating to how primates navigate their environmental space, and investigations that consider the naturalistic context of the individual are few and fragmented. Moreover, there are competing theories about whether only the right or rather both cerebral hemispheres are involved in the processing of social stimuli, especially in emotion processing. Here we provide the first report of lateralized social behaviors elicited by great apes. We employed a continuous focal animal sampling method to record the spontaneous interactions of a captive zoo-living colony of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and a biological family group of peer-reared western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). We specifically focused on which side of the body (i.e., front, rear, left, right) the focal individual preferred to keep conspecifics. Utilizing a newly developed quantitative corpus-coding scheme, analysis revealed both chimpanzees and gorillas demonstrated a significant group-level preference for focal individuals to keep conspecifics positioned to the front of them compared with behind them. More interestingly, both groups also manifested a population-level bias to keep conspecifics on their left side compared with their right side. Our findings suggest a social processing dominance of the right hemisphere for context-specific social environments. Results are discussed in light of the evolutionary adaptive value of social stimulus as a triggering factor for the manifestation of group-level lateralized behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
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Nakamura, K., Takimoto-Inose, A., & Hasegawa, T. (2018). Cross-modal perception of human emotion in domestic horses (Equus caballus). Scientific Reports, 8(1), 8660.
Abstract: Humans have domesticated many kinds of animals in their history. Dogs and horses have particularly close relationships with humans as cooperative partners. However, fewer scientific studies have been conducted on cognition in horses compared to dogs. Studies have shown that horses cross-modally distinguish human facial expressions and recognize familiar people, which suggests that they also cross-modally distinguish human emotions. In the present study, we used the expectancy violation method to investigate whether horses cross-modally perceive human emotions. Horses were shown a picture of a human facial expression on a screen, and they then heard a human voice from the speaker before the screen. The emotional values of the visual and auditory stimuli were the same in the congruent condition and different in the incongruent condition. Horses looked at the speaker significantly longer in the incongruent condition than in the congruent condition when they heard their caretaker's voices but not when they heard the stranger voice. In addition, they responded significantly more quickly to the voice in the incongruent condition than in the congruent one. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to show that horses cross-modally recognized the emotional states of their caretakers and strangers.
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d'Ingeo, S., Quaranta, A., Siniscalchi, M., Stomp, M., Coste, C., Bagnard, C., et al. (2019). Horses associate individual human voices with the valence of past interactions: a behavioural and electrophysiological study. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 11568.
Abstract: Brain lateralization is a phenomenon widely reported in the animal kingdom and sensory laterality has been shown to be an indicator of the appraisal of the stimulus valence by an individual. This can prove a useful tool to investigate how animals perceive intra- or hetero-specific signals. The human-animal relationship provides an interesting framework for testing the impact of the valence of interactions on emotional memories. In the present study, we tested whether horses could associate individual human voices with past positive or negative experiences. Both behavioural and electroencephalographic measures allowed examining laterality patterns in addition to the behavioural reactions. The results show that horses reacted to voices associated with past positive experiences with increased attention/arousal (gamma oscillations in the right hemisphere) and indicators of a positive emotional state (left hemisphere activation and ears held forward), and to those associated with past negative experiences with negative affective states (right hemisphere activation and ears held backwards). The responses were further influenced by the animals' management conditions (e.g. box or pasture). Overall, these results, associating brain and behaviour analysis, clearly demonstrate that horses' representation of human voices is modulated by the valence of prior horse-human interactions.
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Lansade, L., Colson, V., Parias, C., Trösch, M., Reigner, F., & Calandreau, L. (2020). Female horses spontaneously identify a photograph of their keeper, last seen six months previously. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 6302.
Abstract: Horses are capable of identifying individual conspecifics based on olfactory, auditory or visual cues. However, this raises the questions of their ability to recognize human beings and on the basis of what cues. This study investigated whether horses could differentiate between a familiar and unfamiliar human from photographs of faces. Eleven horses were trained on a discrimination task using a computer-controlled screen, on which two photographs were presented simultaneously (32 trials/session): touching one was rewarded (S+) and the other not (S-). In the training phase, the S+ faces were of four unfamiliar people which gradually became familiar over the trials. The S- faces were novel for each trial. After the training phase, the faces of the horses' keepers were presented opposite novel faces to test whether the horses could identify the former spontaneously. A reward was given whichever face was touched to avoid any possible learning effect. Horses touched the faces of keepers significantly more than chance, whether it was their current keeper or one they had not seen for six months (t = 3.65; p < 0.004 and t = 6.24; p < 0.0001). Overall, these results show that horses have advanced human face-recognition abilities and a long-term memory of those human faces.
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Camerlink, I., Menneson, S., Turner, S. P., Farish, M., & Arnott, G. (2018). Lateralization influences contest behaviour in domestic pigs. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 12116.
Abstract: Cerebral lateralization, i.e. hemispheric asymmetries in structure and function, relates in many species to a preference to attack from their left. Lateralization increases cognitive capacity, enabling the simultaneous processing of multiple sources of information. Therefore, lateralization may constitute a component of fighting ability (Resource Holding Potential), and/or influence the efficiency of information-gathering during a contest. We hypothesized that lateralization will affect contest outcome and duration, with an advantage for more strongly lateralized individuals. In 52 dyadic contests between weight-matched pigs (Sus scrofa; n = 104; 10 wk age), the direction of orientation towards the opponent was scan sampled every 10 s. Laterality indexes (LI) were calculated for the direction and strength of lateralization. Up to 12.5% of the individuals showed significant lateralization towards either the right or left but lateralization was absent at the population level. In line with our hypothesis, animals showing strong lateralization (irrespective of direction) had a shorter contest duration than animals showing weak lateralization. Winners did not differ from losers in their strength or direction of lateralization. Overall the results suggest that cerebral lateralization may aid in conflict resolution, but does not directly contribute to fighting ability, and will be of value in the study of animal contests.
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Hofmeester, T. R., Cromsigt, J. P. G. M., Odden, J., Andrén, H., Kindberg, J., & Linnell, J. D. C. (2019). Framing pictures: A conceptual framework to identify and correct for biases in detection probability of camera traps enabling multi-species comparison. Ecol Evol, .
Abstract: Abstract Obtaining reliable species observations is of great importance in animal ecology and wildlife conservation. An increasing number of studies use camera traps (CTs) to study wildlife communities, and an increasing effort is made to make better use and reuse of the large amounts of data that are produced. It is in these circumstances that it becomes paramount to correct for the species- and study-specific variation in imperfect detection within CTs. We reviewed the literature and used our own experience to compile a list of factors that affect CT detection of animals. We did this within a conceptual framework of six distinct scales separating out the influences of (a) animal characteristics, (b) CT specifications, (c) CT set-up protocols, and (d) environmental variables. We identified 40 factors that can potentially influence the detection of animals by CTs at these six scales. Many of these factors were related to only a few overarching parameters. Most of the animal characteristics scale with body mass and diet type, and most environmental characteristics differ with season or latitude such that remote sensing products like NDVI could be used as a proxy index to capture this variation. Factors that influence detection at the microsite and camera scales are probably the most important in determining CT detection of animals. The type of study and specific research question will determine which factors should be corrected. Corrections can be done by directly adjusting the CT metric of interest or by using covariates in a statistical framework. Our conceptual framework can be used to design better CT studies and help when analyzing CT data. Furthermore, it provides an overview of which factors should be reported in CT studies to make them repeatable, comparable, and their data reusable. This should greatly improve the possibilities for global scale analyses of (reused) CT data.
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