Der Einfluss tierischer sozio-kognitiver Fähigkeiten auf Mensch-Tier-Interaktionen am Beispiel von Ziegen und deren Handling
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
A detailed understanding of how ungulate livestock species perceive and interact with human handlers is necessary to improve their welfare by means of better and more adequate human-animal interactions. However, their socio-cognitive capacities are not well understood yet. Thus, the goal of the current project was to evaluate the cognitive capacities of domestic goats, with a special focus on how goats interact with human handlers. In a series of experiments, goats were confronted with different problem-solving tasks or situations in which they had to use information from humans in order to receive a reward. A first experiment addressed their ability to differentiate between human attentive states. Goats could choose between two experimenters while only one of them was paying attention to the subject. Test subjects did not show a preference for the attentive person when the inattentive person turned her head away from the subject. In addition, goats preferred to approach the attentive person compared to a person who closed their eyes or covered the whole face with a blind. However, goats showed no preference when one person covered only the eyes. The results show that animals bred for production show differences in their choice behaviour depending on human attentive state. A second experiment investigated goats’ ability to use human pointing gestures to locate a hidden reward. The results of this experiment indicate that goats rely on stimulus enhancement, but less on referential information, when using human pointing gestures in an object choice task. In a third experiment, goats were trained to solve a task with was subsequently rendered unsolvable. When confronted with this task that they cannot solve themselves, goats frequently interacted with humans and took into consideration the attentional stance of the experimenter during their communicative behaviour. A fourth experiment investigated potential social learning from humans by goats. It was found that, when confronted with a spatial problem-solving task, a single demonstration from a human boosted goats’ performance in this specific task. To summarize, goats demonstrated in all experiments the ability to interact and communicate context-specific and in complex ways with humans, indicating highly developed socio-cognitive capacities. The experiments conducted in this project showed that cognitive test paradigms designed to investigate complex human-animal interactions in canids and primates can also be administered to domestic goats and paves the way for more complex test designs conducted on farm animals. The results indicate that domestic goats possess sophisticated socio-cognitive capacities to interact and communicate with human handlers, while the role of domestication and ontogeny needs to be addressed in future research. The outcomes of this project will foster the understanding of human-livestock interactions and, as socio-cognitive capacities affect the ability of ungulate livestock to adapt to human handling and husbandry conditions, will thus help to improve farm animal husbandry and welfare in the long-term.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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(2016) Goats display audience-dependent human-directed gazing behaviour in a problem-solving task. Biology Letters 12: 20160283
Nawroth, C., Brett, J. M., McElligott, A. G.
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(2016) Goats learn socially from humans in a spatial problem-solving task. Animal Behaviour 121: 123–129
Nawroth, C., Baciadonna, L., McElligott, A. G.
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(2017) Human head orientation and eye visibility as indicators of attention for goats (Capra hircus). PeerJ 5: e3073
Nawroth, C., McElligott, A. G.
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(2017) Individual personality differences in goats predict their performance in visual learning and non-associative cognitive tasks. Behavioural Processes 134: 43–53
Nawroth, C., Prentice, P. M., McElligott, A. G.
