Abstract
The revision of EU legislation will ban the use of wild-caught animals in scientific procedures. This change is partially predicated on the assumption that captive-rearing produces animals with reduced fearfulness. Previously, we have shown that hand-reared starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) indeed exhibit reduced fear of humans compared to wild-caught conspecifics. Here, we asked whether this reduction in fear in hand-reared birds is limited to fear of humans or extends more generally to fear of novel environments and novel objects. Comparing 6–8 month old birds hand-reared in the lab with age-matched birds caught from the wild as fledged juveniles a minimum of 1 month previously, we examined the birds' initial reactions in a novel environment (a small cage) and found that wild-caught starlings were faster to initiate movement compared to the hand-reared birds. We interpret this difference as evidence for greater escape motivation in the wild-caught birds. In contrast, we found no differences between hand-reared and wild-caught birds when tested in novel object tests assumed to measure neophobia and exploratory behaviour. Moreover, we found no correlations between individual bird's responses in the different tests, supporting the idea that these measure different traits (e.g. fear and exploration). In summary, our data show that developmental origin affects one measure of response to novelty in young starlings, indicative of a difference in either fear or coping style in a stressful situation. Our data contribute to a growing literature demonstrating effects of early-life experience on later behaviour in a range of species. However, since we did not find consistent evidence for reduced fearfulness in hand-reared birds, we remain agnostic about the welfare benefits of hand-rearing as a method for sourcing wild birds for behavioural and physiological research.
Highlights
Wild-caught, non-domesticated species, especially birds, are widely used in laboratory research as models for biological phenomena that cannot be studied in standard laboratory animals [1]
Novel Environment Test General linear models (GLMs) on the individual measures from this test - Lat(move), Lat(feed), Lat(walls), T(walls), CeilingJumps, and PositionChanges - revealed a significant effect of origin on Lat(move) with the wildcaught birds showing shorter latencies (Figure 1)
We found that hand-reared starlings were slower to start moving in a novel environment than wild-caught birds, but the response to novel objects was not different between the two groups
Summary
Wild-caught, non-domesticated species, especially birds, are widely used in laboratory research as models for biological phenomena that cannot be studied in standard laboratory animals [1]. This is likely to become more difficult in future because pending changes in European legislation introduce a ban on the use of wild-caught animals in scientific procedures [2]. This change in legislation is partially predicated on the assumption that captive-reared animals exhibit reduced levels of fear of humans [3]. This lack of evidence is concerning, given the high costs of captive breeding/rearing and the potential for other, possibly undesirable, effects on the animals that could alter their value as models for behavioural and physiological research [5,6,7]
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