Abstract
Personality is often defined as the behaviour of individual animals that is consistent across contexts and over time. Personality traits may become unstable during stages of ontogeny from infancy to adulthood, especially during major periods of development such as around the time of sexual maturation. The personality of domesticated farm animals has links with productivity, health and welfare, but to our knowledge, no studies have investigated the development and stability of personality traits across developmental life stages in a mammalian farm animal species. Here, we describe the consistency of personality traits across ontogeny in dairy cattle from neonate to first lactation as an adult. The personality traits ‘bold’ and ‘exploratory’, as measured by behavioural responses to novelty, were highly consistent during the earlier (before and after weaning from milk) and later (after puberty to first lactation) rearing periods, but were not consistent across these rearing periods when puberty occurred. These findings indicate that personality changes in cattle around sexual maturation are probably owing to major physiological changes that are accelerated under typical management conditions at this time. This work contributes to the understanding of the ontogeny of behaviour in farm animals, especially how and why individuals differ in their behaviour.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 191849 |
| Journal | Royal Society Open Science |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 1 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding
Ethics. The experiment and all procedures were approved by the University of British Columbia’s Animal Care Committee (protocol no. A15-0117). Data accessibility. Raw data and statistical analysis code are included in the electronic supplementary material. Datasets and SAS code can be found in the Mendeley repository at: doi:10.17632/gy7dkst6nm.1. Authors’ contributions. H.W.N., J.H.C.C., D.M.W. and M.A.G.v.K. conceived and designed the study. H.W.N and J.H.C.C. collected and analysed the data. H.W.N. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. J.H.C.C. contributed as secondary author to the manuscript. M.A.G.v.K. and D.M.W. provided supervision, financial support and study materials, interpreted the data, and provided critical feedback on this paper. Competing interests. The authors declare no competing interests. Funding. H.W.N. was supported by Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Canada Graduate Scholarship. This work was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery grant no. NSERC RGPIN-2015-06219 awarded to M.A.G.v.K. Acknowledgements. We thank all the staff and students of the UBC Dairy Education and Research Centre who helped in this experiment, especially Katrina Rosenberger, Gabriella Marquette, Thomas Ede, Julie Wong, Cheryl Linaksita, Juliana Benetton, Jennifer Van Os, Stephanie Boeve and Benjamin Lecorps for their help with data collection.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada | RGPIN-2015-06219 |
| Luonnontieteiden ja Tekniikan Tutkimuksen Toimikunta |
Keywords
- Behavioural syndrome
- Development
- Ontogeny
- Temperament
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General