Trösch, M., Pellon, S., Cuzol, F., Parias, C., Nowak, R., Calandreau, L., et al. (2020). Horses feel emotions when they watch positive and negative horse-human interactions in a video and transpose what they saw to real life. Anim. Cogn., 23(4), 643–653.
Abstract: Animals can indirectly gather meaningful information about other individuals by eavesdropping on their third-party interactions. In particular, eavesdropping can be used to indirectly attribute a negative or positive valence to an individual and to adjust one's future behavior towards that individual. Few studies have focused on this ability in nonhuman animals, especially in nonprimate species. Here, we investigated this ability for the first time in domestic horses (Equus caballus) by projecting videos of positive and negative interactions between an unknown human experimenter (a “positive” experimenter or a “negative” experimenter) and an actor horse. The horses reacted emotionally while watching the videos, expressing behavioral (facial expressions and contact-seeking behavior) and physiological (heart rate) cues of positive emotions while watching the positive video and of negative emotions while watching the negative video. This result shows that the horses perceived the content of the videos and suggests an emotional contagion between the actor horse and the subjects. After the videos were projected, the horses took a choice test, facing the positive and negative experimenters in real life. The horses successfully used the interactions seen in the videos to discriminate between the experimenters. They touched the negative experimenter significantly more, which seems counterintuitive but can be interpreted as an appeasement attempt, based on the existing literature. This result suggests that horses can indirectly attribute a valence to a human experimenter by eavesdropping on a previous third-party interaction with a conspecific.
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Versace, E., Morgante, M., Pulina, G., & Vallortigara, G. (2007). Behavioural lateralization in sheep (Ovis aries). Behav. Brain. Res., 184(1), 72–80.
Abstract: This study investigates behavioural lateralization in sheep and lambs of different ages. A flock was tested in a task in which the animals were facing an obstacle and should avoid it on either the right or left side to rejoin flock-mates (adult sheep) or their mothers (lambs). A bias for avoiding the obstacle on the right side was observed, with lambs apparently being more lateralized than sheep. This right bias was tentatively associated with the left-hemifield laterality in familiar faces recognition which has been documented in this species. Differences between adult sheep and lambs were likely to be due to differences in social reinstatement motivation elicited by different stimuli (flock-mates or mothers) at different ages. Preferential use of the forelegs to step on a wood-board and direction of jaw movement during rumination was also tested in adult animals. No population bias nor individual-level lateralization was observed for use of the forelegs. At the same time, however, there was a large number of animals showing individual-level lateralization for the direction of jaw movement during rumination even though there was no population bias. These findings highlight that within the same species individual- and population-level lateralization can be observed in different tasks. Moreover, the results fit the general hypothesis that population-level asymmetries are more likely to occur in tasks that require social coordination among behaviourally asymmetric individuals.
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Voigtlaender-Schnabel, S., Vogel, L., Greiner, B., Wiezorek, S., Schuette, P., Solmsen, E. - H., et al. (2022). Reactions of horses to wildlife and livestock guarding dogs. CDPNews, 24, 49–58.
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Wallner, B., Palmieri, N., Vogl, C., Rigler, D., Bozlak, E., Druml, T., et al. (2017). Y Chromosome Uncovers the Recent Oriental Origin of Modern Stallions. Current Biology, 27(13), 2029–2035.e5.
Abstract: The Y chromosome directly reflects male genealogies, but the extremely low Y chromosome sequence diversity in horses has prevented the reconstruction of stallion genealogies [1, 2]. Here, we resolve the first Y chromosome genealogy of modern horses by screening 1.46 Mb of the male-specific region of the Y chromosome (MSY) in 52 horses from 21 breeds. Based on highly accurate pedigree data, we estimated the de novo mutation rate of the horse MSY and showed that various modern horse Y chromosome lineages split much later than the domestication of the species. Apart from few private northern European haplotypes, all modern horse breeds clustered together in a roughly 700-year-old haplogroup that was transmitted to Europe by the import of Oriental stallions. The Oriental horse group consisted of two major subclades: the Original Arabian lineage and the Turkoman horse lineage. We show that the English Thoroughbred MSY was derived from the Turkoman lineage and that English Thoroughbred sires are largely responsible for the predominance of this haplotype in modern horses.
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Wotschikowsky, U. (2007). Wölfe und Jäger in der Oberlausitz. Broschüre, Freundeskreis freilebender Wölfe, .
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