Dataset Information

Goats work for food in a contrafreeloading task.

ABSTRACT: Contrafreeloading (CFL) is the phenomenon when animals work for a resource although an identical resource is available for free. Possible explanations for CFL are that animals seek context for species-specific behaviours or to control their environments. We investigated whether goats show CFL and whether breeding for productivity traits has altered its occurrence. In a manipulation task, we compared two selection lines: 27 Nigerian dwarf goats, not bred for productivity traits, and 30 dairy goats, bred for high milk yield. Over 10 trials, each goat could perform one of three behaviours: not participating in the trial, feeding for free from an open door, or opening a sliding door for a feed of similar value. The results were analysed using an Item Response Tree (IRTree) generalized linear mixed model (GLMM). The fitted probabilities to participate were?>?0.87 over all trials in both selection lines. For dwarf goats, the probability of choosing the closed door, and thereby demonstrating CFL, increased from 0.30 in Trial 1 to 0.53 in Trial 10. For dairy goats, this probability was constant at approximately 0.43. Unlike dwarf goats, dairy goats were faster to approach the closed compared to the open door. Overall, our results suggest that both selection lines were similarly interested in CFL.

SUBMITTER: Rosenberger K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7752918 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Goats work for food in a contrafreeloading task.

Rosenberger K K Simmler M M Nawroth C C Langbein J J Keil N N

Scientific reports 20201221 1

Contrafreeloading (CFL) is the phenomenon when animals work for a resource although an identical resource is available for free. Possible explanations for CFL are that animals seek context for species-specific behaviours or to control their environments. We investigated whether goats show CFL and whether breeding for productivity traits has altered its occurrence. In a manipulation task, we compared two selection lines: 27 Nigerian dwarf goats, not bred for productivity traits, and 30 dairy goat ...[more]

PMID: 33349649

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Project description:IntroductionThe computational demands of sociality (maintaining group cohesion, reducing conflict) and ecological problems (extractive foraging, memorizing resource locations) are the main drivers proposed to explain the evolution cognition. Different predictions follow, about whether animals would preferentially learn new tasks socially or not, but the prevalent view today is that intelligent species should excel at social learning. However, the predictions were originally used to explain primate cognition, and studies of species with relatively smaller brains are rare. By contrast, domestication has often led to a decrease in brain size, which could affect cognition. In domestic animals, the relaxed selection pressures compared to a wild environment could have led to reduced social and physical cognition. Goats possess several features commonly associated with advanced cognition, such as successful colonization of new environments and complex fission-fusion societies. Here, we assessed goat social and physical cognition as well as long-term memory of a complex two-step foraging task (food box cognitive challenge), in order to investigate some of the main selection pressures thought to affect the evolution of ungulate cognition.ResultsThe majority of trained goats (9/12) successfully learned the task quickly; on average, within 12 trials. After intervals of up to 10 months, they solved the task within two minutes, indicating excellent long-term memory. The goats did not learn the task faster after observing a demonstrator than if they did not have that opportunity. This indicates that they learned through individual rather than social learning.ConclusionsThe individual learning abilities and long-term memory of goats highlighted in our study suggest that domestication has not affected goat physical cognition. However, these cognitive abilities contrast with the apparent lack of social learning, suggesting that relatively intelligent species do not always preferentially learn socially. We propose that goat cognition, and maybe more generally ungulate cognition, is mainly driven by the need to forage efficiently in harsh environments and feed on plants that are difficult to access and to process, more than by the computational demands of sociality. Our results could also explain why goats are so successful at colonizing new environments.

Dataset Information

Goats work for food in a contrafreeloading task.

Publications

Goats work for food in a contrafreeloading task.

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