TY - JOUR

T1 - Behavioural strategies or just individual variation in behaviour? - A lack of evidence for active and passive piglets

AU - Jensen, P.

AU - Rushen, J.

AU - Forkman, B.

N1 - Funding Information: Per Jensen and BjGrn Forkman wish to acknowledge a grant from the Swedish Council for Forestry and Agricultural Research, financing a project on aggression and individual variation in pig behaviour. Erik Jorgensen at Research Centre Foulum kindly corrected some statistical flaws in an earlier version of this paper.

PY - 1995/5

Y1 - 1995/5

N2 - We criticize the recent paper by Hessing et al. (1993, Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci., 37: 285-295), where it is concluded that there are "consistent individual behavioural strategies in social and non-social situations in pigs", resembling the active and passive coping strategies of mice. We argue: (1) The authors have not demonstrated that the underlying distributions of individuals deviate from a normal distribution. Thus the existence of two distinct types of individuals is a premise of the research and not a conclusion. It is arrived at by choosing arbitrary cut-off points. (2) The social test used is not suited for determining individual characteristics, and the so called back test is difficult to interpret. It has not been verified that the back test is a non-social test. (3) The two-way classification based on these two tests excludes a substantial proportion of the piglets. We conclude that the authors provide no evidence for distinct individual types of piglets.

AB - We criticize the recent paper by Hessing et al. (1993, Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci., 37: 285-295), where it is concluded that there are "consistent individual behavioural strategies in social and non-social situations in pigs", resembling the active and passive coping strategies of mice. We argue: (1) The authors have not demonstrated that the underlying distributions of individuals deviate from a normal distribution. Thus the existence of two distinct types of individuals is a premise of the research and not a conclusion. It is arrived at by choosing arbitrary cut-off points. (2) The social test used is not suited for determining individual characteristics, and the so called back test is difficult to interpret. It has not been verified that the back test is a non-social test. (3) The two-way classification based on these two tests excludes a substantial proportion of the piglets. We conclude that the authors provide no evidence for distinct individual types of piglets.

KW - Aggression

KW - Coping

KW - Pigs

KW - Stress

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0001291316&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/0168-1591(95)00554-6

DO - 10.1016/0168-1591(95)00554-6

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:0001291316

VL - 43

SP - 135

EP - 139

JO - Applied Animal Behaviour Science

JF - Applied Animal Behaviour Science

SN - 0168-1591

IS - 2

ER -