Susann Oesterwind

• Dr. rer. nat.
• PostDoc Position at Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN)

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...

Farm animal welfare is a major concern for society and food production. To more accurately evaluate animal farming in general and to avoid exposing farm animals to poor welfare situations, it is necessary to understand not only their behavioral but also their cognitive needs and capacities. Thus, general knowledge of how farm animals perceive and i...

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...

The ability to establish categories enables organisms to classify stimuli, objects and events by assessing perceptual, associative or rational similarities and provides the basis for higher cognitive processing. The cognitive capabilities of farm animals are receiving increasing attention in applied ethology, a development driven primarily by scien...

Features of an individual's early development are frequently reported to alter the postnatal ontogeny in litter-bearing mammals with respect to various physiological parameters. We hypothesized that such effects might also apply to the ontogeny of personality types. On the one hand, litter size effects by means of more contacts with littermates, mi...

Animals in the wild are facing a wide variety of challenges and ever-changing environmental stimuli. For successful coping, animals use both innate behavioural programs and their cognitive skills. In contrast, zoo- and farm animals have to cope with restricted husbandry conditions, which offer only few opportunities to adequately satisfy their vari...

An animal's environment during early life can strongly affect its physiological development. For example, litter size, i.e. the number of litter siblings, has been previously shown to strongly affect early growth in many small mammal species including laboratory rats. In the present study we tested whether natural, unmanipulated litter size is also...