Abstract: Animal management often involves procedures that, while unlikely to cause physical pain, still cause aversive responses. The domestic horse (Equus caballus) regularly has excessive hair clipped off to facilitate its use as a riding/driving animal and this procedure causes adverse behavioral responses in some animals. The aim of this study was to compare behavioral and physiological measures to assess the aversive effect of this procedure. Ten horses were selected on the basis of being either compliant (C: n=5) or non-compliant (NC: n=5) during this procedure. The horses were subjected to a sham clipping procedure (SC: where the blades had been removed from the clippers) for a period of ten minutes. Measures were taken pre, during and post SC (-10min to +30min) and mean values calculated for ALL horses and for C and NC separately. Behavioral activity was scored (scale 1-5) by twenty students from video footage in (phase/group-blind scoring). Heart rate (HR), salivary cortisol and eye temperature were monitored throughout the procedure. The NC horses were found to be significantly more behaviorally active/less relaxed throughout the trial than C horses (p<0.05) with the greatest difference occurring during the SC procedure (p<0.01). NC horses were more active/less relaxed during, compared with pre or post SC (p<0.05), but showed no behavioral difference pre and post SC. HR of the NC horses was higher than that of the C horses throughout the trial but only significantly so after 10min of SC (p<0.01). ALL horses showed a significant increase in HR between +5 and +10min into the procedure (p<0.05). There was a significant increase in salivary cortisol concentration in ALL horses post procedure (p<0.01) with levels peaking at 20minute post SC. No significant differences in salivary cortisol concentration between C and NC were found at any stage of the trial. Eye temperature increased significantly in ALL horses during SC, peaking at +10min into the procedure (p<0.05) and then decreased substantially when SC had ceased (p<0.01). Although no significant differences were found between C and NC per se, there was a significant interaction between group and phase of trial (p<0.05) with the NC group showing a greater decrease in eye temperature post SC. There was a significant positive correlation between changes in salivary cortisol concentration and eye temperature (p<0.01) but no correlation between any of the other measures. Although the behavioral response of C and NC to this procedure was significantly different the physiological responses indicated that ALL horses found the procedure aversive. Eye temperature could be used as an objective and immediate measure of how an animal is responding to a specific situation in order to evaluate management procedures and adapt them where appropriate to reduce the negative impact on animal health and welfare.

Abstract: The assessment of cognitive functions in rodents represents a critical experimental variable in many research fields, ranging from the basic cognitive neurosciences to psychopharmacology and neurotoxicology. The increasing use of animal behavioral tests as 'assays' for the assessment of effects on learning and memory has resulted in a considerable heterogeneity of data, particularly in the field of behavioral and psycho pharmacology. The limited predictive validity of changes in behavioral performance observed in standard animal tests of learning and memory indicates that a renewed effort to scrutinize the validity of these tests is warranted. In humans, levels of processing (effortful vs. automatic) and categories of information (procedural vs. episodic/declarative) are important variables of cognitive operations. The design of tasks that assess the recall of 'episodic' or 'declarative' information appears to represent a particular challenge for research using laboratory rodents. For example, the hypothesis that changes in inspection time for a previously encountered place or object are based on the recall of declarative/episodic information requires substantiation. In order to generalize findings on the effects of neuronal or pharmacological manipulations on learning and memory, obtained from one species and one task, to other species and other tasks, the mediating role of important sets of variables which influence learning and memory (e.g. attentional, affective) needs to be determined. Similar to the view that a neuronal manipulation (e.g. a lesion) represents a theory of the condition modeled (e.g. a degenerative disorder), an animal behavioral task represents a theory of the behavioral/cognitive process of interest. Therefore, the test of hypotheses regarding the validity of procedures used to assess cognitive functions in animals is an inherent part of the research process.

Abstract: Network analysis has a long history in the mathematical and social sciences and the aim of this introduction is to provide a brief overview of the potential that it holds for the study of animal behaviour. One of the most attractive features of the network paradigm is that it provides a single conceptual framework with which we can study the social organisation of animals at all levels (individual, dyad, group, population) and for all types of interaction (aggressive, cooperative, sexual etc.). Graphical tools allow a visual inspection of networks which often helps inspire ideas for testable hypotheses. Network analysis itself provides a multitude of novel statistical tools that can be used to characterise social patterns in animal populations. Among the important insights that networks have facilitated is that indirect social connections matter. Interactions between individuals generate a social environment at the population level which in turn selects for behavioural strategies at the individual level. A social network is often a perfect means by which to represent heterogeneous relationships in a population. Probing the biological drivers for these heterogeneities, often as a function of time, forms the basis of many of the current uses of network analysis in the behavioural sciences. This special issue on social networks brings together a diverse group of practitioners whose study systems range from social insects over reptiles to birds, cetaceans, ungulates and primates in order to illustrate the wide-ranging applications of network analysis.

Abstract: I review literature on four different approaches to the study of traditions in animals: observation of free-living animals, laboratory experiment, armchair analysis, and field experiment. Because, by definition, a tradition entails social learning of some kind, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish that a behavior is in fact traditional without knowledge of how it develops. Observations of free-living animals often provide strong circumstantial evidence of a tradition. However, even in the view of several researchers who have studied possibly traditional behaviors in natural populations, observation alone has not proven sufficient to show that social learning contributes to development of behaviors of interest. The relevance of laboratory experiments to the understanding of the development of behaviors in free-living animals is always open to challenge. Armchair analyses of field data can produce interesting hypotheses but cannot test them. Field experiments to determine how behaviors of interest develop in population members provide a promising way forward.