For example heart rate can be used as an indicator of arousal but increases in heart rate occur across a range of emotional valences which may be positive (e.g. Negatively valenced states may be particularly strong indicators of poor welfare, however it can often be difficult to determine the valence of an affective state using behavioural and physiological indicators. Arousal describes the physiological activation of the state while valence describes whether the state is hedonically positive or negative. Affective state is currently understood as a position of the animal within an “affective space” delineated by axes described as valence and arousal. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īs animal welfare becomes an increasingly important consideration for society, we need to develop more practical measures of welfare which take into account the emotional or affective states of animals. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: This work was supported by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) (internal funding, URL: and the Australian Wool Education trust (2015 Undergraduate Project Scholarship, URL: and the Sheep CRC. Received: JAccepted: DecemPublished: January 2, 2018Ĭopyright: © 2018 Monk et al. In both experiments, treatments did not appear to modify activity (zones crossed), which we propose indicates the test was primarily detecting valence of the affective state rather than arousal.Ĭitation: Monk JE, Doyle RE, Colditz IG, Belson S, Cronin GM, Lee C (2018) Towards a more practical attention bias test to assess affective state in sheep. Behaviour of these sheep did not differ from the sheep tested without loggers, indicating data logger attachment did not impact their behaviour in the test. A third group of sheep were also tested with the dog immediately after having small data loggers attached to their necks. Sheep exposed to an empty window at the beginning of the test behaved differently to those which were exposed to a dog, indicating sheep behaviour in the test is at least partially a response to the dog. Experiment 2 aimed to confirm the responses measured in the test were primarily towards the dog rather than other aspects of the test environment. During testing, 36 of 40 animals in the control and anxiolytic groups ate the novel feed offered in the test, indicating it is not necessary to habituate animals to a feed container.
Differences in behaviour were found between the treatment groups within the first 45s of the test, indicating the original test duration could be shortened from 180 s. Sheep were given either an anxiolytic drug, an anxiogenic drug or a control treatment prior to testing to induce contrasting affective states. Experiment 1 of the current study aimed to refine the previously developed method, removing the need for a habituation period and shortening the test duration. The 3 minute test assessed behavioural responses of sheep in an enclosed arena after brief exposure to the threat of a dog. An attention bias test has previously been developed for sheep and validated as a measure of anxious states.
Tests for attention bias potentially offer more rapid assessment of affective state in animals than existing cognitive methods.
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