Department for Farm Animals and Veterinary Public Health, Institute of Animal Welfare Science, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Dev Psychobiol. 2022 May;64(4):e22269. doi: 10.1002/dev.22269.
Maternal deprivation has been shown to disrupt the development of neonates. Nevertheless, separating the young animals from their dams soon after birth is a common practice in dairy farming. We investigated the effects of maternal deprivation on goat kids' (Capra hircus) social behavior and social ontogeny before and after weaning. Twenty female kids were raised together with their dams (DR kids) and other lactating goats and kids, whereas 20 female kids were separated from their dams 3 days after birth and artificially reared together (AR kids). At weaning, each treatment group was split in half and moved into two new pens where they were mixed with the other treatment group. Social behaviors were recorded before and after weaning. Before weaning, AR kids were observed performing more play-fighting, racing, stepping on each other, and standing in contact with each other than DR kids, but AR allogroomed less and spent less time resting alone than DR kids. After weaning and mixing of the treatments, DR kids initiated more and received less agonistic interactions than AR kids, but this difference reduced across the 5 weeks of observations as AR kids appeared to progressively change their social behavior after interacting with DR kids.
母体剥夺已被证明会破坏新生儿的发育。然而，在奶牛养殖中，将幼小动物与其母羊分开是一种常见的做法。我们研究了母体剥夺对山羊幼崽（Capra hircus）断奶前后社会行为和社会发生的影响。20 只雌性幼崽与它们的母羊（DR 幼崽）和其他哺乳期的山羊和幼崽一起饲养，而 20 只雌性幼崽在出生后 3 天与母羊分开并进行人工饲养（AR 幼崽）。在断奶时，每个处理组被分成两半，并转移到两个新的围栏中，与另一个处理组混合。在断奶前后记录了社会行为。在断奶前，AR 幼崽比 DR 幼崽表现出更多的玩耍打斗、赛跑、踩踏和相互站立的行为，但 AR 幼崽的相互梳理行为较少，独自休息的时间也较少。断奶后和处理混合后，DR 幼崽发起的攻击性行为比 AR 幼崽多，但随着 AR 幼崽与 DR 幼崽互动后，它们的社会行为似乎逐渐发生变化，这种差异在 5 周的观察中减少了。
