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Social tolerance in livestock
Applied Animal Ethology, 8 (1982) 501-505 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands
501
Editorial SOCIAL TOLERANCE
IN LIVESTOCK
A.F. FRASER Memorial University of Newfoundland,
St. John’s, Newfoundland
(Canada)
INTRODUCTION
In attempting to embrace some behavioural realities, applied ethology finds itself forced to cope with items which have, until now, lacked scientific respectability. Such matters as “open-awareness”, “animal cognition”, and “ethological entitlement”, for example, continue to call for statements and opinions which have had little opportunity as yet to be founded on thorough scientific study or discussion. Distress in the behaviour of an animal is one example of a factor which, while not measurable, is tangible enough; the behaviours of boredom and frustration are others. In such situations, applied animal ethologists are obliged to take more of a professional stance than an objective, scientific one. Each time that such a stance is successfully taken, however, the boundary of the discipline becomes extended. As the boundary of applied animal ethology expands in many directions, so the leading edges face wider fronts of the secular domain where ethology has not strongly established its presence. In this domain, one person’s views may be as valid or invalid as those of any other, unless they happen to be unbiased and based on a very substantial appreciation of the issue in question. Scientific knowledge is a necessary basis for balanced opinions on animal needs, rights and welfare. This requires that we keep our boundaries suitably fenced with scientific comprehension, even when we deal with common events such as the social affairs of livestock. Some of these affairs involve remarkable ways of nature, and social tolerance is not the least of those. This tolerance brings to our attention certain points highly relevant to current interests . THE AVOIDANCE
SYSTEM
The recognition, by Swedish workers in applied ethology, of an “avoidance system” in the social behaviour of pigs is apparently a breakthrough in fundamental comprehension. The phenomenon of an avoidance system, at once so obvious and so subtly obscured, has been overlooked by many ethologists working in the aggression field. It seems such camouflaged behaviour that its researchers might require to be well equipped with technical refinements to expose it. Indirect and continuously recorded scrutiny may be the method of
0304-3762/82/0000~000/$02.75
0 1982 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company
502
capturing finite primary records to be processed by sophisticated computer analysis for overall comprehension. Avoidance is an inverse response in agonistic situations and it is the positive factor effecting agonistic control. Evidently the generally accepted belief that dominance, by itself, established and operated social hierarchy is inadequate. The avoidance system in behaviour - which is like the mirror image of the dominance system - is the vital component of the behavioural mechanism which generates social stabilization. Of course, avoidance is an overall strategy which calls for specific behavioural tactics, and these tactics need space for their practical operation. In social stabilization, one suspects that the releasers which make the underlying avoidance system work have to be prompt, behavioural responses which are minute, discrete, speedily learned and imperatively unambiguous. Avoidance serves to reduce contests between individual animals, but if the contest develops, any one of four types of tactic can be adopted. This gives scope for a variety of courses in games of conflict among social animals (Maynard Smith, 1978). This arrangement has been most recently considered by Zeeman (1981), who analysed the dynamics of animal conflicts which entail the four types of strategy paraphrased as Hawk, Dove, Bully and Retaliator. The contest courses of given strategies reviewed by Zeeman have been extrapolated in Table I. All four pure strategies employed in conflict situations in a full population have advantages and disadvantages. Some individuals, however, inherit or adopt mixed strategies, sometimes, for example, playing Hawk, sometimes playing Bully. These varied tactics evidently lead progressively to a stable “peck order”. Maintenance of such stabilization seems to be the essence of the avoidance system. TABLE
I
Contest
courses
Strategy
Hawk Dove Bully Retaliator PACTIVE
type
for four strategies Initial contest tactic Escalate Display Escalate Display
in a conflict Subsequent
game (after
Zeeman,
1981)
tactic if oponent:-
Escalates
Submits
Escalate Flight Flight Escalate
Terminate Terminate Aggression Terminate
BEHAVIOUR
It seems that animals are using organized tactics of stable social living which may well prove to be their own pacts and systems of pacts. Is it not odd that the whole notion of pactive behaviour in animals has been so largely passed over? Does the seeming passivity of association not excite us? Almost certainly it has been staring us in the face as vital trade-off agreements in behaviour.
503
Truces and pacts in reproduction (notably in some birds) are abundant and Huxley, as long ago as 1914, described a “reversal of the sexes”, in the Great Crested Grebe, as something of a pact, although he did not use this choice of word. Other examples of pactive behaviour include bachelor grouping and matriarchal dominance. We must research pactive phenomena with all the vigour that our modest school of applied ethologists can muster. Perhaps pure ethologists will help. One observes that the latter are moving into our areas of practical concern, and we are more than pleased to have them. Of course, certain pure ethologists have been some of our stalwarts in the discipline of applied ethology for a decade and they deserve to be remembered for this. BONDING
AND “ANTI-BONDING”
Ethological studies of social events have lately been extended to encompass bond formation in its various features and several important reports dealing with this phenomenon in sheep have appeared in this journal. The component features of bonding show it as great behavioural machinery with its sensory basis, initiation, specificity, intensity, duration and its differing manifestations. The social roles of bonding are great, and firm bonds are to be found within peck-ordered hierarchies. In clearly established hierarchies there is maximal group-bonding and minimal aggression, creating the social stability which is a vital requirement in good animal husbandry. A social hierarchy is not an inviolable structure, however, it is merely the state of settled-out relationships between individuals which take such forms as growing partnerships. Friendship pairs are formed and these involve mutual sympathy. Within the overall pactive relationship there is a dove-tailing of bonding and “anti-bonding”. The latter term might be useful to describe the avoiding action taken against close association and possible bonding. The function and durability of the hierarchy is dependent upon component relationships and upon on-going, operative avoidance tactics within these. In fact, “dominance hierarchy” may be a misconception for a social relationship based on a sympathy gradient of tolerance. The position in the gradient gives graded “tenure” rights in social affairs. ENTITLED
BEHAVIOUR
As the debate on the rights of animals is taken into abstract directions, our concepts of these rights might come to relate more to our own emotive needs than to true animal nature. As the case for the animals becomes couched in extremist terms, the likelihood is that their fair rights could become diminished in the eyes of an unmoved majority. A balanced sensitivity to all life is needed to recognize the reality of nature. This sensitivity will appreciate the natural ways of animals and their grades of sentience. This property of sentience has both an upward flow in evolution to the primates and an open-
504
ended gradient down through the cold-blooded vertebrates. Sentience may be the factor which motivates avoidance as a tactic in antagonistic situations. Certain amounts of agonistic tactics within the formation of social groups are unavoidable, and they are possibly essential for bodily interactions and general activity. They require a control system and an end point of tolerance. Methods of deconfinement and density alleviation must be considered in the context of spatial needs. The very successful and innovative swine husbandry system devised by Nehring (1981) shows that dense confinement can be alleviated by imaginative design of presmises such as a maze layout, which allows a given quantity of floor space to have more avoidance potential. For further practical study of space potential, experimental premises permitting finely varied adjustment in horizontal shape may be needed. Direct observations, even using earnest viewers, may not be suitable for such subtle behavioural events. While needs and rights in general will be the great concern of all who wish to get into current popular debates on animal advocacy, the major phenomena of tolerance and avoidance may be more realistic business for working ethologists. To be sure, animals have their entitlements, to maintenance behaviours, for example. In addition, some “rights” are being artfully invented by our awaked consciousness, but one basic right is a social truce which avoidance fosters. In considering these needs and their related manoeuvres, we must remind ourselves of a “horizontal perspective”, to which many young animals and most farm animals (notably swine) limit themselves in the acts of selfdeployment. This presents to us the notion of spatial need in the interest of social tolerance. Certain socio-technopathies, such as wool-pulling in sheep and tail-biting in swine, are behavioural “disassociations” in animal husbandry. They imply that certain environmental group needs have not been met and that there is a failure in social tolerance. As practical scientists, applied ethologists have to see “needs” as a great issue. This needs issue will possibly occupy us in the way that the instincts issue once occupied so much of the attention of pure ethologists. We can be assured that the needs issue will surely expand our boundaries of debate and of concept. Little doubt can remain about a need for space when we recognize that avoidance, although it embraces it, is more than submissiveness alone, and that space is required for tolerance to become established within confined groups. CONCLUSION
Whatever our practical persuasions and vested interests, great inquiry into pactive behaviour and avoidance in the domesticated animals is overdue. In the confines of their highly abused and manipulated lives, it is astonishing that functional systems of this nature can work at all, as surely they must. Pacts between animals are there to be seen, and avoidance is continuous when two or more animals congregate.
505
If the findings in animal avoidance studies come to represent biological laws, their elucidation could have such value in the human world, sorely in need of tolerance, that one’s mind becomes overwhelmed by the thought. As conspecific aggression may have produced in animals the arts of selfdefence, so avoidance may generate a kind of savoir vivre - even in livestock. One sees great potential for such new ambitious business in this journal; we need scientific documentation of the sundry ways in which tolerance operates in animal life.
REFERENCES Huxley, J., 1914. The Courship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe. Jonathan Cape, London. Maynard Smith, J., 1978. The evolution of behaviour. Sci. Am., 239: 176-192. Nehring, A., 1981. One answer to the confinement pig problem. Int. J. Study Anim. Probl., 2(5): 256-259. Zeeman, E.C., 1981. Dynamics of the evolution of animal conflicts. J. Theor. Biol., 89: 249-270.
501
Editorial SOCIAL TOLERANCE
IN LIVESTOCK
A.F. FRASER Memorial University of Newfoundland,
St. John’s, Newfoundland
(Canada)
INTRODUCTION
In attempting to embrace some behavioural realities, applied ethology finds itself forced to cope with items which have, until now, lacked scientific respectability. Such matters as “open-awareness”, “animal cognition”, and “ethological entitlement”, for example, continue to call for statements and opinions which have had little opportunity as yet to be founded on thorough scientific study or discussion. Distress in the behaviour of an animal is one example of a factor which, while not measurable, is tangible enough; the behaviours of boredom and frustration are others. In such situations, applied animal ethologists are obliged to take more of a professional stance than an objective, scientific one. Each time that such a stance is successfully taken, however, the boundary of the discipline becomes extended. As the boundary of applied animal ethology expands in many directions, so the leading edges face wider fronts of the secular domain where ethology has not strongly established its presence. In this domain, one person’s views may be as valid or invalid as those of any other, unless they happen to be unbiased and based on a very substantial appreciation of the issue in question. Scientific knowledge is a necessary basis for balanced opinions on animal needs, rights and welfare. This requires that we keep our boundaries suitably fenced with scientific comprehension, even when we deal with common events such as the social affairs of livestock. Some of these affairs involve remarkable ways of nature, and social tolerance is not the least of those. This tolerance brings to our attention certain points highly relevant to current interests . THE AVOIDANCE
SYSTEM
The recognition, by Swedish workers in applied ethology, of an “avoidance system” in the social behaviour of pigs is apparently a breakthrough in fundamental comprehension. The phenomenon of an avoidance system, at once so obvious and so subtly obscured, has been overlooked by many ethologists working in the aggression field. It seems such camouflaged behaviour that its researchers might require to be well equipped with technical refinements to expose it. Indirect and continuously recorded scrutiny may be the method of
0304-3762/82/0000~000/$02.75
0 1982 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company
502
capturing finite primary records to be processed by sophisticated computer analysis for overall comprehension. Avoidance is an inverse response in agonistic situations and it is the positive factor effecting agonistic control. Evidently the generally accepted belief that dominance, by itself, established and operated social hierarchy is inadequate. The avoidance system in behaviour - which is like the mirror image of the dominance system - is the vital component of the behavioural mechanism which generates social stabilization. Of course, avoidance is an overall strategy which calls for specific behavioural tactics, and these tactics need space for their practical operation. In social stabilization, one suspects that the releasers which make the underlying avoidance system work have to be prompt, behavioural responses which are minute, discrete, speedily learned and imperatively unambiguous. Avoidance serves to reduce contests between individual animals, but if the contest develops, any one of four types of tactic can be adopted. This gives scope for a variety of courses in games of conflict among social animals (Maynard Smith, 1978). This arrangement has been most recently considered by Zeeman (1981), who analysed the dynamics of animal conflicts which entail the four types of strategy paraphrased as Hawk, Dove, Bully and Retaliator. The contest courses of given strategies reviewed by Zeeman have been extrapolated in Table I. All four pure strategies employed in conflict situations in a full population have advantages and disadvantages. Some individuals, however, inherit or adopt mixed strategies, sometimes, for example, playing Hawk, sometimes playing Bully. These varied tactics evidently lead progressively to a stable “peck order”. Maintenance of such stabilization seems to be the essence of the avoidance system. TABLE
I
Contest
courses
Strategy
Hawk Dove Bully Retaliator PACTIVE
type
for four strategies Initial contest tactic Escalate Display Escalate Display
in a conflict Subsequent
game (after
Zeeman,
1981)
tactic if oponent:-
Escalates
Submits
Escalate Flight Flight Escalate
Terminate Terminate Aggression Terminate
BEHAVIOUR
It seems that animals are using organized tactics of stable social living which may well prove to be their own pacts and systems of pacts. Is it not odd that the whole notion of pactive behaviour in animals has been so largely passed over? Does the seeming passivity of association not excite us? Almost certainly it has been staring us in the face as vital trade-off agreements in behaviour.
503
Truces and pacts in reproduction (notably in some birds) are abundant and Huxley, as long ago as 1914, described a “reversal of the sexes”, in the Great Crested Grebe, as something of a pact, although he did not use this choice of word. Other examples of pactive behaviour include bachelor grouping and matriarchal dominance. We must research pactive phenomena with all the vigour that our modest school of applied ethologists can muster. Perhaps pure ethologists will help. One observes that the latter are moving into our areas of practical concern, and we are more than pleased to have them. Of course, certain pure ethologists have been some of our stalwarts in the discipline of applied ethology for a decade and they deserve to be remembered for this. BONDING
AND “ANTI-BONDING”
Ethological studies of social events have lately been extended to encompass bond formation in its various features and several important reports dealing with this phenomenon in sheep have appeared in this journal. The component features of bonding show it as great behavioural machinery with its sensory basis, initiation, specificity, intensity, duration and its differing manifestations. The social roles of bonding are great, and firm bonds are to be found within peck-ordered hierarchies. In clearly established hierarchies there is maximal group-bonding and minimal aggression, creating the social stability which is a vital requirement in good animal husbandry. A social hierarchy is not an inviolable structure, however, it is merely the state of settled-out relationships between individuals which take such forms as growing partnerships. Friendship pairs are formed and these involve mutual sympathy. Within the overall pactive relationship there is a dove-tailing of bonding and “anti-bonding”. The latter term might be useful to describe the avoiding action taken against close association and possible bonding. The function and durability of the hierarchy is dependent upon component relationships and upon on-going, operative avoidance tactics within these. In fact, “dominance hierarchy” may be a misconception for a social relationship based on a sympathy gradient of tolerance. The position in the gradient gives graded “tenure” rights in social affairs. ENTITLED
BEHAVIOUR
As the debate on the rights of animals is taken into abstract directions, our concepts of these rights might come to relate more to our own emotive needs than to true animal nature. As the case for the animals becomes couched in extremist terms, the likelihood is that their fair rights could become diminished in the eyes of an unmoved majority. A balanced sensitivity to all life is needed to recognize the reality of nature. This sensitivity will appreciate the natural ways of animals and their grades of sentience. This property of sentience has both an upward flow in evolution to the primates and an open-
504
ended gradient down through the cold-blooded vertebrates. Sentience may be the factor which motivates avoidance as a tactic in antagonistic situations. Certain amounts of agonistic tactics within the formation of social groups are unavoidable, and they are possibly essential for bodily interactions and general activity. They require a control system and an end point of tolerance. Methods of deconfinement and density alleviation must be considered in the context of spatial needs. The very successful and innovative swine husbandry system devised by Nehring (1981) shows that dense confinement can be alleviated by imaginative design of presmises such as a maze layout, which allows a given quantity of floor space to have more avoidance potential. For further practical study of space potential, experimental premises permitting finely varied adjustment in horizontal shape may be needed. Direct observations, even using earnest viewers, may not be suitable for such subtle behavioural events. While needs and rights in general will be the great concern of all who wish to get into current popular debates on animal advocacy, the major phenomena of tolerance and avoidance may be more realistic business for working ethologists. To be sure, animals have their entitlements, to maintenance behaviours, for example. In addition, some “rights” are being artfully invented by our awaked consciousness, but one basic right is a social truce which avoidance fosters. In considering these needs and their related manoeuvres, we must remind ourselves of a “horizontal perspective”, to which many young animals and most farm animals (notably swine) limit themselves in the acts of selfdeployment. This presents to us the notion of spatial need in the interest of social tolerance. Certain socio-technopathies, such as wool-pulling in sheep and tail-biting in swine, are behavioural “disassociations” in animal husbandry. They imply that certain environmental group needs have not been met and that there is a failure in social tolerance. As practical scientists, applied ethologists have to see “needs” as a great issue. This needs issue will possibly occupy us in the way that the instincts issue once occupied so much of the attention of pure ethologists. We can be assured that the needs issue will surely expand our boundaries of debate and of concept. Little doubt can remain about a need for space when we recognize that avoidance, although it embraces it, is more than submissiveness alone, and that space is required for tolerance to become established within confined groups. CONCLUSION
Whatever our practical persuasions and vested interests, great inquiry into pactive behaviour and avoidance in the domesticated animals is overdue. In the confines of their highly abused and manipulated lives, it is astonishing that functional systems of this nature can work at all, as surely they must. Pacts between animals are there to be seen, and avoidance is continuous when two or more animals congregate.
505
If the findings in animal avoidance studies come to represent biological laws, their elucidation could have such value in the human world, sorely in need of tolerance, that one’s mind becomes overwhelmed by the thought. As conspecific aggression may have produced in animals the arts of selfdefence, so avoidance may generate a kind of savoir vivre - even in livestock. One sees great potential for such new ambitious business in this journal; we need scientific documentation of the sundry ways in which tolerance operates in animal life.
REFERENCES Huxley, J., 1914. The Courship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe. Jonathan Cape, London. Maynard Smith, J., 1978. The evolution of behaviour. Sci. Am., 239: 176-192. Nehring, A., 1981. One answer to the confinement pig problem. Int. J. Study Anim. Probl., 2(5): 256-259. Zeeman, E.C., 1981. Dynamics of the evolution of animal conflicts. J. Theor. Biol., 89: 249-270.