Animal Welfare and Behaviour Internship Offer
Professorship of Animal Husbandry, Behaviour and Welfare, University of Giessen
Germany
The primary aim of the Green Dairy sub-project is to determine whether calves’ emotional state is affected by certain experiences, such as different feeding intensities of their dams during gestation or illnesses. Our research focuses on evaluating how these factors influence the emotional state of dairy calves through Judgement Bias Tests.
Shortly, Judgement Bias Tests assess the response to ambiguous cues of animals that were previously trained to associate contrasting cues with either a positive (i.e. food reward) or negative (i.e. time out) outcomes (discrimination training). The underlying principle is that individuals in a negative emotional state perceive ambiguous cue more negatively compared to those in a positive emotional state, which perceive the ambiguous cue more positively.
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