Birger Puppe

• Prof. Dr.
• Head of Department at Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology

Technological advances promise to greatly assist the study of animal behaviour, but the validation of these technologies is often neglected due to its tedious and labour-intensive nature. This paper addresses the challenges of manual annotation in validating technological tools for animal behaviour research. We detail the implementation and effecti...

Vocalisations and activity are important factors for monitoring animal behaviour. Previous studies have shown that these parameters are altered in the context of disease, farrowing and distress. In the highly standardized conditions of livestock farming, these contexts are often closely linked to specific areas of the barn-enabling to infer informa...

In poultry behavior research, the reliance on presence data to estimate actual resource usage has substantially increased with the advent of tracking technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID) and image-based systems. Although such widely used technologies are fundamentally designed for presence tracking, many studies claim to use t...

Passive radio frequency identification (RFID) can advance poultry behavior research by enabling automated, individualized, longitudinal, in situ, and noninvasive monitoring; these features can usefully extend traditional approaches to animal behavior monitoring. Furthermore, since the technology can provide insight into the visiting patterns of tag...

The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of intraperitoneal N-arachidonoylethanolamide (AEA) on taste preference for feed and water, tongue taste receptor signalling (TAS1R2, GNAT3), and endocannabinoid (CNR1, CNR2, GPR55) and opioid (OPRD1, OPRK1, OPRM1, OPRL1) receptors in the amygdala and nucleus accumbens in periparturient cows. We...

Signal-feeding is a discrimination task for pigs where individual acoustic signals indicate the availability of feed at an electronic feeding station. It has been shown that this feeding technique has the potential to reduce agonistic interactions between pigs and improve animal welfare. As a side effect, signal-feeding was found to facilitate the...

A wide range of species exhibit time- and context-consistent interindividual variation in a number of specific behaviors related to an individual's personality. Several studies have shown that individual differences in personality-associated behavioral traits have an impact on cognitive abilities. The aim of this study was to investigate the relati...

Both humans and nonhuman animals need to show self-control and wait for a larger or better reward instead of a smaller or less preferred but instant reward on an everyday basis. We investigated whether this ability undergoes ontogenetic development in domestic pigs (similar to what is known in human infants) by testing if and for how long nine- and...

Indiscriminate voiding of excreta by cattle contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and soil and water contamination¹,². Emissions are higher in animal-friendly husbandry offering cattle more space² — a trade-off we call the ‘climate killer conundrum’. Voiding in a specific location (latrine) would help resolve this dilemma by allowing ready...

Due to high ammonia and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from livestock farming, both technical and behavioural solutions for reducing discharges need to be developed. Ammonia is formed when faeces and urine come into contact. A behavioural approach to facilitate separation of excreta would be to train cattle to use a latrine. Reliable latrine...

Due to high ammonia and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from livestock farming, both technical and behavioural solutions for reducing discharges need to be developed. Ammonia is formed when faeces and urine come into contact. A behavioural approach to facilitate separation of excreta would be to train cattle to use a latrine. Reliable latrine...

URL: http://ign-nutztierhaltung.ch/sites/default/files/PDF/IGN_Spezial_21_Symposium_Kognition.pdf Editors Christian Nawroth, Nina Keil, Jan Langbein ISBN:978-3-9525478-2-3

The growing recognition of animals as individuals has broader implications for farm animal welfare research. Even under highly standardized on-farm conditions, farm animals show heterogeneous but individually consistent behavioural patterns towards various stimuli, based on how they appraise these stimuli. As a result, animal welfare is likely to b...

Modern pig housing environments provide animals with essential resources, but from an animal’s point of view, they are quite barren and deprive them of the opportunity to make full use of their natural behavioural repertoire and actively work for these resources. The lack of stimulation resulting from such environments compromises animal welfare. T...

Ammoniakemissionen stammen in Europa zu einem großen Teil aus der Rinderhaltung und führen zu Umweltschäden. Eine Möglichkeit diese zu reduzieren, ist die Trennung von Kot und Urin unmittelbar nach der Ausscheidung. Dafür können Rinder trainiert werden, ihre Ausscheidungen in einer speziellen Latrine abzusetzen. Eine mögliche Trainingsprozedur habe...

In humans, speech perception is lateralized, with the left hemisphere of the brain dominant in processing the communicative content and the right hemisphere dominant in processing the emotional content. However, still little is known about such a division of tasks in other species. We therefore investigated lateralized processing of communicative a...

Simple Summary The mixing of bovine faeces and urine leads to climate-damaging ammonia emissions. If cattle could be taught to use a latrine, this would reduce the area of emissions, the separation of excreta could easily be accomplished by mechanical means, and animal health could be improved. Attempts to train toileting in cattle have shown limit...

Typically, cattle urinate and defecate with little or no control over time and place. The resulting excreta contributes to a range of adverse effects on the environment and the animals themselves. These adverse effects could be substantially ameliorated if livestock could be toilet trained. Toilet training requires an animal to suppress impending v...

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is an important component of neuroendocrine stress regulation and coping behavior. Transcriptome profiles of the hypothalamus and adrenal gland were assessed to identify molecular pathways and candidate genes for coping behavior in pigs. Ten each of high- (HR) and low- (LR) reactive pigs (n = 20) were s...

Emotions, unlike mood, are short-lived reactions associated with specific events. They can be characterized by two main dimensions, their arousal (bodily activation) and valence (negative versus positive). Knowledge of the valence of emotions experienced by domestic and captive animals is crucial for assessing and improving their welfare, as it ena...

Emotions, unlike mood, are short-lived reactions associated with specific events. They can be characterized by two main dimensions, their arousal (bodily activation) and valence (negative versus positive). Knowledge of the valence of emotions experienced by domestic and captive animals is crucial for assessing and improving their welfare, as it ena...

The observation of laterality –hemispheric asymmetries in structure and/or function– is a promising non-invasive approach to better understand animal affect since it can give insight into cerebral processes underlying the key components of emotions. The emotional valence hypothesis states that positive emotions are mostly processed by the left hemi...

Oestrus detection remains a problem in the dairy cattle industry. Therefore, automatic detection systems have been developed to detect specific behavioural changes at oestrus. Vocal behaviour has not been considered in such automatic oestrus detection systems in cattle, though the vocalisation rate is known to increase during oestrus. The main chal...

Based on the animal’s reaction to environmental challenges, consistent but different coping styles can be identified, which in turn may have consequences for health and welfare. Therefore, profound knowledge of the complex interrelationships between individual behavioral response patterns, underlying neurobiological mechanisms and immunological eff...

Understanding animal emotions is an important scientific and ethical question but assessing emotional valence is still considered challenging. As the observation of lateralization (hemispheric asymmetries in structure and/or function) can provide insight into the underlying processes of the cognitive, physiological and behavioural components of emo...

Studying emotional lateralization is a promising noninvasive approach for investigating and even improving animal welfare. According to the emotional valence hypothesis, the left hemisphere processes positive emotions while the right hemisphere processes negative emotions. This hypothesis could help comprehending lateralized processing of emotional...

Walking ability is related to motor co-ordination which, in rodents, can be assessed by an established test in pharmacological studies — the rotarod test. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a modified rotarod test for chickens and its relation to the often-used gait score system. At the end of their rearing period, we tested 138 male chicken...

Pullets, i. e., chickens of layer lines are often raised in housings equipped with perches. In contrast, broiler chickens most often are raised in a barren environment that lacks any three-dimensional structures, even though broilers also are motivated to use elevated structures. In addition, environmental enrichment may improve welfare problems in...

Stress response and coping behavior in pigs are largely shaped by hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and sympatho-adrenomedullary system action. However, the dynamic interaction between amygdala and hippocampus crucially modulates the behavioral response towards significant emotional events. While this functional relationship is well documented, t...

The assessment of personality in farm animals and its relation to other behavioural and physiological traits is of growing scientific and practical interest. Therefore, the aims of the present study were first to assess the personality of dwarf goats in the context of the proactive/reactive dichotomy and second to elucidate cross-context correlatio...

Delay-of-gratification paradigms, such as the famous “Marshmallow Test,” are designed to investigate the complex cognitive concepts of self-control and impulse control in humans and animals. Such tests determine whether a subject will demonstrate impulse control by choosing a large, delayed reward over an immediate, but smaller reward. Documented r...

Overview of the performance of each pig during the discrimination test over the course of the sessions for both groups (“quantity”: with a quantitative difference in reward, i.e., 1 vs. 4 pieces of the most preferred reward; “quality”: with a qualitative difference in reward, i.e., 1 piece of the most preferred vs. 1 piece of the least preferred re...

Overview of the omissions during the preference test: percentage of omissions with regard to the number of total trials (N = 45) per animal, percentage of items refused by the individual animals (group = “quantity” [amount: 1:4], “quality” [differentially preferred items: low:high]; animal = 1-10) from both groups (group = “quantity” [amount: 1:4],...

Overview of the choices during the preference test: percentage of choices made with regard to the number of total trials (N = 45) per animal, percentage of items chosen by individual animals (group = “quantity” [amount: 1:4], “quality” [differentially preferred items: low:high]; animal = 1-10) from both groups (group = “quantity” [amount: 1:4], “qu...

Animal individuality is challenging to explain because individual differences are regulated by multiple selective forces that lead to unique combinations of characteristics. For instance, the study of personality, a core aspect of individuality, may benefit from integrating other factors underlying individual differences, such as lateralised cerebr...

The domestic fowl (Gallus gallus f. dom.) is highly motivated to roost on elevated structures. Previous studies indicated that broiler chickens hardly use elevated perches but frequently use elevated platforms. However, it is unclear which height and type of elevated structures broilers prefer at various daytimes. We investigated the use of elevate...

Measuring and understanding personality in animals is a rising scientific field. Much research has been conducted to assess distinctive individual differences in behavior in a large number of species in the past few decades, and increasing numbers of studies include farm animals. Nevertheless, the terminology and definitions used in this broad scie...

Self-determined physical activity is an essential behavioural need and can vary considerably between individuals of a given species. Although locomotion is suggested as a prerequisite for adequate function of skeletal muscle, domestic pigs are usually reared under limited space allowance. The aim of our study was to investigate if a different volun...

The reliable detection of estrus is an important scientific and practical challenge in dairy cattle farming. Female vocalization may indicate reproductive status, and preliminary evidence suggests that this information can be used to detect estrus in dairy cattle. The aim of this study was to associate the changes in the vocalization rate of dairy...

Motor lateralization is hypothesized to depend on the complexity of the motor function, but it might at the same time reflect hemispheric dominance within an individual across motor functions. We investigated possible motor lateralization patterns in four motor functions of different complexity (snout use in a manipulative task, foot use in two-ste...

Impulse control is the ability to resist the impulse taking an immediate but smaller/ worse reward instead of choosing a delayed but bigger/better reward. Only one study showed that pigs have the ability to show impulse control. The present study first examined whether there are differences in impulse control when the food reward differs in quality...

Exposure to psychosocial stress can have a profound impact on immune reactivity and health mediated by hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activation. However, current knowledge regarding the mechanisms involved in cross-sensitization between stress and the immune system is limited. Here, we investigated the effects of a single social isolati...

Vocalizations have long been recognized to encode information about an individual's emotional state and, as such, have contributed to the study of emotions in animals. However, the potential of vocalizations to also encode information about an individual's emotional reactivity has received much less attention. In this study, we aimed to test whethe...

In order to protect farm animal welfare, one first needs to establish a working definition of the term , welfare', i.e. the society needs to agree on what comprises welfare; then, valid indicators are needed to evaluate it. This article first lays out a definition of welfare, and then intro-duces several welfare indicators in pigs, with a special f...

Based on individual adaptive strategies (coping), animals may react differently to environmental challenges in terms of behavior and physiology according to their emotional perception. Emotional valence as well as arousal may be derived by measuring vagal and sympathetic tone of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). We investigated the situation-depe...

Since the introduction of the backtest for the early detection of coping strategies in piglets by Hessing in the 1990s, this behavioural test has been intensively investigated with ambiguous results. One possible explanation for this lack of consistency might be the different classification methods used in many studies, so the first aim of this res...

The assessment and provision of welfare in farm animals has become a major issue in animal science. A key element for providing good welfare is the enabling of positive affective states in the animals. As the serotonergic system plays a central role in regulating affective behavior, an increase in centrally available serotonin (5-HT) via dietary su...

Martinho and Kacelnik (Reports, 15 July 2016, p. 286) reported that newly hatched ducklings imprinted on relational concepts. We argue that reanalyzing the data at the individual level shows that this conclusion cannot be applied for all sets of stimuli presented and that the ability to grasp relational concepts is limited to the stimulus category...

Cognitive and affective processes are highly interrelated. This has implications for neuropsychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder in humans but also for the welfare of non-human animals. The brain serotonergic system might play a key role in mediating the relationship between cognitive functions and affective regulation. The aim of...

The presence of an affiliative conspecific may alleviate an individual’s stress response in threatening conditions. However, the mechanisms and neural circuitry underlying the process of social buffering have not yet been elucidated. Using the domestic pig as an animal model, we examined the effect of a 4-h maternal and littermate deprivation on st...

Immer mehr Studien nutzen die Erfassung kognitiver Bewertungstendenzen („cognitive bias“) zur Bestimmung affektiver Zustände. Die zugrunde liegenden physiologischen Mechanismen sind allerdings noch weitgehend ungeklärt. Die hier vorgestellte Studie setzt am serotonergen System an, wobei durch pharmakologische Manipulation die Serotoninverfügbarkeit...

Zusammenfassung Serotonin, das aus der essentiellen Aminosäure Tryptophan (TRP) gebildet wird, ist so-wohl in die Steuerung der Nahrungsaufnahme als auch in die Regulation affektiver Zu-stände involviert. Ob eine TRP-Supplementierung der Nahrung und damit verbunden eine Erhöhung der TRP-und Serotoninkonzentration im Gehirn auch den affektiven Zusta...

Zusammenfassung In der vorliegenden Studie wurde der Zusammenhang zwischen Persönlichkeits-(Coping-) Typ und autonomer Reaktion von Schweinen in unterschiedlichen Verhaltenskontexten untersucht. Vierzehn Schweine der deutschen Landrasse wurden dem proaktiven oder reaktiven Coping-Typ zugeordnet (Backtest). Im Alter von 70 Tagen wurde mittels ei-nes...

Zusammenfassung In den letzten Jahrzehnten ist die Persönlichkeitsforschung bei Tieren, vor allem auch bei Nutztieren, immer mehr in den Fokus der Forschung gerückt. Einer von mehreren Ansätzen, um personality zu verstehen, ist die Untersuchung von proaktiven und reakti-ven Bewältigungstypen. Proaktive Individuen sind explorativ, risikofreudig und...

Public concern for farm animal welfare calls for reliable scientific tools to measure it. Measuring cognitive bias, i.e., the influence of affective states on cognitive processing, has gained importance during recent years. The one most often adapted experimental design to test cognitive bias in non-human animals is the spatial judgement task, wher...

The aim of our study was to characterize the immediate phenotypic and adaptive regulatory responses of fetuses to different in utero conditions reflecting inadequate maternal protein supply during gestation. The gilts fed high- (250% above control) or low- (50% under control) protein diets isoenergetically adjusted at the expense of carbohydrates f...

The cognitive bias approach provides information on the valence of affective states in non-human animals. In our study, we used a serotonin depletion model using para-Chlorophenylalanine (pCPA) to decrease brain serotonin levels in pigs in order to validate our cognitive bias paradigm and provide insight into its neural underpinnings. All experimen...

Since several years applied ethologists gained more and more interest in the concept of animal personality and its practical implementations in animal breeding, management, housing and welfare. Referring to the concept of coping, Hessing introduced the backtest in young piglets in the early 1990s and hypothesized that it can detect coping strategie...

Analysis of heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP) and their respective variability (HRV, BPV) may provide a sensitive measure of autonomic activity. This allows the analysis of changes in sympathovagal balance related to diseases, psychological stressors or individual characteristics such as coping strategies. Characterization of piglets based on th...

Analysis of heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP) and their respective variability may provide a sensitive measure of affective states, emotions, and stress, mediated by changes in sympathetic and parasympathetic tone. Most studies that incorporate cardiac activity to evaluate subjective states in farm animals are directed on the assessment of HR an...

There is growing evidence that social support given by a conspecific attenuates stress responses of a socially deprived animal. We hypothesized that the presence of a familiar social partner modulates the effectiveness of social buffering as assessed by an altered glucocorticoid sensitivity of immune cells. The current study investigated the effect...

Abnormal behaviour is a potential indicator of pain, suffering and injury in captive animals. Especially stereotypies, i.e. repetitive invariant behavioural patterns without obvious function or goal, can be observed as a consequence of inadequate housing conditions. Hence, they are often considered indicators of impaired welfare. In context of the...

In the study of animal emotions, emotional valence has been found to be difficult to measure. Many studies of farm animals' emotions have therefore focussed on the identification of indicators of strong, mainly negative, emotions. However, subtle variations in emotional valence, such as those caused by rather moderate differences in husbandry condi...

Animal personality and coping styles are basic concepts for evaluating animal welfare. Struggling response of piglets in so-called backtests early in life reflects their coping strategy. Behavioral reactions of piglets in backtests have a moderate heritability, but their genetic basis largely remains unknown. Here, latency, duration and frequency o...

The first aim of this study was to establish a surgical procedure to implant a new telemetric device for the continuous recording of electrocardiogram (ECG) and blood pressure (BP) in freely moving pigs. A second aim was the functional assessment of cardiovascular parameters, including heart rate variability (HRV) and blood pressure variability (BP...

This study assessed the interchangeability between heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) measures derived from a series of interbeat intervals (IBIs) recorded via electrocardiogram (ECG) and intra-arterial blood pressure (BP) in various behavioral contexts. Five minutes of simultaneously recorded IBIs from ECG and BP signals in 11 female...

Defining phenotypes according to molecular features would promote the knowledge of functional traits like behaviour in both human and animal research. Beside physiological states or environmental factors, an innate predisposition of individual coping strategies was discussed , including the proactive and reactive pattern. According to backtest reac...

The objective of this study was to examine the autonomic response of nine pigs in a feeding context. Due to the simultaneous registration of ECG and blood pressure, the autonomic balance of the pigs was assessed. Furthermore, relationships between individual coping-types and autonomic reaction were provided. These findings confirm results of other...

There is growing evidence that positive social interactions can attenuate the effects of stressful life experiences. However, little is known about the benefits of social partners on stress responses in farm animals. Therefore, in this study we examined the effects of social support on the endocrine and immune stress responses to a single 4 h socia...

Social deprivation is a severe stressor affecting a number of behavioral and physiological functions of gregarious species. It is assumed that, dependent upon the level of familiarity, social support given by a conspecific may attenuate the adverse consequences of stress. We investigated the effects of a 4 h maternal and littermate deprivation on b...

Individual phenotyping has increasingly been gaining relevance in farm animal biology. For several years, the backtest in pigs has been discussed controversially as a behavioural test providing evidence for coping strategies. In the current study, a total of 3555 piglets were used to evaluate whether the animals show more than random variation in b...

The study presents the establishment of an invasive telemetric system for the continuous assessment of cardiac activity in 10 analyzed pigs. During a ten-day period of convalescence the animals were recovering well from surgery and the cardiovascular parameters (heart rate, heart rate variability, blood pressure) stabilized. To complete the concept...

Studies on animal temperament have often described temperament using a one-dimensional scale, whereas theoretical framework has recently suggested 2 or more dimensions using terms like “valence” or “arousal” to describe these dimensions. Yet, the valence or assessment of a situation is highly individual. The aim of this study was to provide support...

Studies on animal temperament have often described temperament using a one-dimensional scale, whereas theoretical framework has recently suggested two or more dimensions using terms like "valence" or "arousal" to describe these dimensions. Yet, the valence or assessment of a situation is highly individual. The aim of this study was to provide suppo...