Abstract
Despite scientific interest in animal empathy, and growing public concern for farm animal welfare, the empathic abilities of farm animals remain under researched. In this study, we investigated empathic responses of young Holstein dairy calves to conspecifics recovering from hot-iron disbudding, a painful procedure common on dairy farms. A combination of social approach and place conditioning was used. First, ‘observer’ calves witnessed two ‘demonstrator’ calves recover from either a painful procedure (hot-iron disbudding and sedation) or a sham procedure (sedation alone) in distinct pens. Observer calves spent more time in proximity and paid more attention to calves recovering from the painful procedure compared to sham calves (proximity: 59.6 ± 4.3%; attention: 54.3 ± 1.5%). Observers were then tested for conditioned place aversion (in the absence of demonstrators) at 48h, 72h and 96h after the second demonstration; observers tended to avoid the pen associated with conspecific pain during the second of the three tests, spending 34.8 ± 9.6% of their time in this pen. No strong evidence of pain empathy was found, but our tentative results encourage further research on empathy in animals.
Highlights
Assessing animal empathy is not straightforward, in part because the definition of empathy is subject to disagreement [1,2,3]
Cattle are routinely subjected to painful procedures, including hot-iron disbudding for dairy calves [14,15], providing an opportune model to explore empathic responses to pain
During conditioned place aversion tests preference for the pen associated with conspecific pain was calculated as a ratio of time spent in the ‘pain’ pen compared to the total amount of time spent in both treatment pens
Summary
Assessing animal empathy is not straightforward, in part because the definition of empathy is subject to disagreement [1,2,3]. Cattle are routinely subjected to painful procedures, including hot-iron disbudding for dairy calves [14,15], providing an opportune model to explore empathic responses to pain. In an effort to examine a more complex empathic process (defined as ‘true empathy’ by Edgar et al [18]), we tested whether the empathic response was valenced (i.e. positive or negative) by using conspecific state as a conditioning stimuli in a place conditioning paradigm [19] (Objective 2). As previously shown in mice, we predicted that a conspecific state of pain would result in conditioned place aversion [17]. We predicted that calves showing more pain behaviours would be more attractive as a social partner and elicit stronger conditioned aversion
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