Important role of dominance in allogrooming behaviour in beef cattle  

ŠÁROVÁ, Radka, GUTMANN, A. K., ŠPINKA, Marek, STĚHULOVÁ, Ilona a WINCKLER, CH. Important role of dominance in allogrooming behaviour in beef cattle  . Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 2016, 18, 41-48. ISSN 0168-1591.
Kateg. publikaceVědecké publikace impaktované
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Abstrakt

In domestic cattle, the relationship between dominance and allogrooming behaviour has been investigated in several studies. However, the results do not show a consistent pattern. The aim of this study was to investigate this relationship in a stable female beef cattle herd using social network analysis as a novel methodological approach. We tested two adaptive allogrooming hypotheses. The ‚Grooming-for-Commodity‘ hypothesis posits that allogrooming is directed from low ranking animals towards higher ranking cows in exchange of tolerance and other favours. The ‚Grooming-for-Stability‘ hypothesis predicts that allogrooming is performed by high ranking animals down the hierarchy in order to perpetuate the stability of the social structure. We recorded a herd of 15 Gasconne cows on pasture for 3 weeks (180. h) and recorded 681 agonistic interactions and 288 allogrooming events. To evaluate the relationship between dominance and allogrooming behaviour we calculated correlations between dominance index, individual behavioural effort (OUT-direction), and individual attractiveness (IN-direction). We found that more dominant animals provided much higher amount of allogrooming acts (p.

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OdděleníEtologie