The effects of early stress on life-time strategies of behaviour and coping in chickens ( Gallus gallus )

Sammanfattning:

Stress is often an important consideration for animal welfare. A number of factors can contribute to stress in domestic animals, most notably thoseused in food production. We investigated the effects and heritability of stress in domestic chickens (Gallus gallus). Using a spatial learning paradigm, we tested an early social isolation-stressed group and their offspring against unstressed controls, to determine if this cognitive function was negatively affected by stress. In the parental generation, we found that across sessions control birds improved in performance, indicating a learning trend. Stressed birds showed no difference across sessions, indicating a lack of learning. No effects of the parental treatment were found in the offspring of stress and control birds. Social isolation stress was found to affect spatial memory learning, however, we did not find evidence that the parental stress influenced the spatial abilities of the next generation despite changes in other behaviours.