A Quantitative Approach for Using Anticipatory Behavior as a Graded Welfare Assessment

Area of Science:

• Animal behavior
• Animal welfare science
• Ethology

Background:

• Assessing animal welfare often relies on specific behavioral indicators, which can be difficult to interpret.
• Anticipatory behavior is a promising indicator of animal well-being but challenging to quantify.
• Existing methods struggle to capture the nuances and intensity variations in anticipatory behaviors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and evaluate a novel analytical approach for identifying and comparing the intensity of anticipatory behavior.
• To assess changes in sea lion behavior before and after predictable and unpredictable training sessions.
• To demonstrate the utility of this approach in distinguishing varying intensities of anticipation.

Main Methods:

• Observed and analyzed behavioral changes in a sea lion at the San Francisco Zoo.
• Compared behavior before and after daily training sessions with varying predictability.
• Utilized a proposed analytical approach to quantify anticipatory behavior intensity.

Main Results:

• Anticipatory behavior is a complex set of actions exhibiting multi-directional changes before an event.
• The developed methods successfully distinguished between different intensities of anticipation.
• Observed significant changes in sea lion behavior related to the predictability of training sessions.

Conclusions:

• The proposed analytical approach effectively quantifies anticipatory behavior intensity.
• Anticipatory behavior can serve as a graded indicator of animal well-being.
• This method has broad applicability for enhancing animal welfare assessments across species.