Abstract
We propose that a comparative approach to well-being could be the key to understanding ‘the good life.’ Inspired by current theories of human well-being and animal welfare, we designed a novel test of exploration behavior. Environmentally and socially enriched Long-Evans female rats (N = 60) were trained in four simultaneously presented arms of an eight-arm radial-maze. They learned to expect successes in two arms and failures in the other two. After training, 20 animals remained in enriched housing (enrichment-maintenance) while 40 animals were re-housed in standard, isolated conditions (enrichment-removal). Two weeks later, all animals were re-tested in the maze, initially with access to the four familiar arms only. In the final minute, they also had access to the unfamiliar ambiguous-arms. Though both groups showed significant interest in the ambiguous-arms (P<.0001), the enrichment-maintenance group showed a significantly greater exploratory tendency (P<.01) despite having equivalent levels of activity (P>.3). Thus, we show not only that rats will abandon known rewards and incur risk in order to explore, indicating that exploration is valuable in its own right, but also that individuals with (vs. without) enriched housing conditions are more likely to engage in such exploratory behavior. This novel test contributes to the body of knowledge examining the importance of exploration in humans and other animals; implications for animal welfare and human well-being are discussed.
Highlights
Many of the basic patterns of human well-being contain corollaries throughout the animal kingdom from pessimistic cognition in stressed honeybees [1] to longevity in happy orangutans [2]
We developed a novel test of rat exploration behavior based on theories from animal welfare science and human well-being research
During the first four minutes of the test, when the ambiguous doors were still closed, rats in both conditions spent significantly more of the test time in the success-arms than in the failure-arms: 37.80% and 7.18%, respectively, t(59) = 20.96, p
Summary
Many of the basic patterns of human well-being contain corollaries throughout the animal kingdom from pessimistic cognition in stressed honeybees [1] to longevity in happy orangutans [2]. Human well-being researchers and animal welfare scientists are interested in the same basic questions—what makes life worth living and what environments support such lives—yet more collaboration is possible and likely to be mutually beneficial [3]. In this spirit, we developed a novel test of rat exploration behavior based on theories from animal welfare science and human well-being research. Similar to other welfare researchers who have made discoveries by applying human psychological constructs to animal behavior [4,5], we were interested in developing the parallels regarding the role of exploration in well-being and welfare. We wished to 1) investigate a new method for determining the extent to which animals will forgo known rewards and incur possible risks in order to explore their environment and 2) test how manipulations of environmental quality (i.e., housing enrichment) affect this measure of motivational trade-off, and 3) distinguish exploration motivation from approach motivation
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