Abstract
Swimming behaviour and effects of water baths on stereotyped behaviour in farmed mink (Mustela vison) were studied in three experiments. The singly-housed mink had access from their home cages to extra cages with 20.5 litre water baths. Two short-term experiments aimed to investigate how quickly adult and juvenile mink start using and how consistently they use water baths over 10 days, and whether the extent of the use correlates between dams and their females kits. A four-month experiment was designed to compare the development of stereotyped behaviour in juvenile mink housed with and without swimming opportunity. The behavioural analyses were based on several 24-hour video recordings carried out in all three experiments. There were obvious inter-individual differences and intra-individual consistency in swimming frequency and time. Farmed minks motivation to swim can be assessed in short-term experiments, and measurement of water losses from the swimming baths and use of instantaneous sampling with 10 min sampling intervals provide quite reliable measures of the amount of swimming. The bath use of the juveniles correlated with that of their dams, indicating that an individual minks eagerness to swim may have a genetic component. The lower amount of stereotyped behaviour in mink housed with water baths indicates that long-term access to baths may alleviate frustration in singly-housed juvenile farmed mink.;
Highlights
Charles Darwin was challenged by his opponents with the question of how aquatic carnivores could have evolved from terrestrial carnivores
Mink have been farmed for their fur since the 1860s (European Commission 2001), but farmed mink are not provided with the opportunity to swim, and it has been argued that this might be detrimental to their welfare
We found that the juvenile mink housed with swimming baths had less stereotypies than those housed without baths, indicating that the baths may have alleviated frustration
Summary
Charles Darwin was challenged by his opponents with the question of how aquatic carnivores could have evolved from terrestrial carnivores (see Dunstone 1993, pp. 1-2). The opponents doubted the ability of an intermediate species to cope in either environment. Darwin used American mink (Mustela vison) as an example of a successful intermediate species. Cooper and Mason (2001) discovered in a demand study that mink valued swimming water (and food) over many other resources. Other demand studies have not confirmed these findings, but it has been found that mink value swimming water and running wheels (as measured by the demand elasticity, Hansen and Jensen 2006). Studies comparing mink that are housed with and without water baths have not shown that baths have any long-term positive welfare effects (Skovgaard et al 1997, Hansen and Jeppesen 2000a and b, Hansen and Jeppesen 2001a, Vinke & Spruijt 2001, Vinke et al 2004). It is noteworthy that many mink farms are located in areas where winter is cold
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