Abstract
Giving animals their preferred items (e.g., environmental enrichment) has been suggested as a method to improve animal welfare, thus raising the question of how to determine what animals want. Most studies have employed choice tests for detecting animal preferences. However, whether choice tests represent animal preferences remains a matter of controversy. Here, we present a history-based method to analyse data from individual choice tests to discriminate between preferred and non-preferred items. This method differentially weighs choices from older and recent tests performed over time. Accordingly, we provide both a preference index that identifies preferred items contrasted with non-preferred items in successive multiple-choice tests and methods to detect the strength of animal preferences for each item. We achieved this goal by investigating colour choices in the Nile tilapia fish species.
Highlights
Giving animals their preferred items has been suggested as a method to improve animal welfare, raising the question of how to determine what animals want
We developed a method to separate preferred backgrounds from non-preferred backgrounds and calculate a preference index (PI) and a preference rate (PR), separating individuals based on the intensities of their preference responses
The one-preference fish are ranked in descending order according to their PI (Fig. 3) values in the last choice test
Summary
Giving animals their preferred items (e.g., environmental enrichment) has been suggested as a method to improve animal welfare, raising the question of how to determine what animals want. We present a history-based method to analyse data from individual choice tests to discriminate between preferred and non-preferred items. This method differentially weighs choices from older and recent tests performed over time. We provide both a preference index that identifies preferred items contrasted with non-preferred items in successive multiple-choice tests and methods to detect the strength of animal preferences for each item. Various studies have demonstrated significant individual variability even when preference responses are analysed from a few tests (e.g.26–29) In this context, we propose a history-based method to determine individual preferences from multiple-choice tests. This species has been described to prefer yellow light (2-day test30), and some colours have been demonstrated to affect its behaviour[31,32,33,34] and physiology[32,34,35]
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