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How do pigs recognize each other? Why do chickens fight? These are questions being answered by animal behaviorists like Harold Gonyou and Ruth Newbury.

Gonyou is researching the social behavior of pigs at the Prairie Swine Center. "How they form social groupings," he explains. "How they recognize each other. Do they recognize each other as individuals, or as part of a group?" The answers to these questions may stop pigs from fighting when they're put in the same pen. Fighting is a sign of stress, and stress keeps pigs from reaching their full production value.

Newbury is looking for what triggers cannibalism in poultry at the University of Washington near Seattle. "It's a big problem with chicken and turkey," she says. "They start to peck at one individual and they'll peck it to death."

Some producers trim the birds' beaks to make it more difficult for them to injure each other. "But we know the beak has nerves in it and there's a possibility it causes the birds pain, chronic pain."

Chronic pain can keep an animal nervous and underweight -- that's bad for the birds and bad for producers trying to get the most from their poultry farms.

"We want to know why they do it, who they do it to and understand the behavior better." Newbury says understanding the behavior might lead to less painful ways of limiting poultry attacks.

Newbury says she got into animal behaviorism -- called applied ethology -- in a roundabout way. "I was studying zoology in Scotland," she remembers. In her final year, she had to do a project on animal behavior. Newbury says there was an experiment being run near her university that featured pigs roaming in a semi-natural environment. "So I did my project on that," she says. "That got me interested in that, so I did my PhD on that."

Newbury says you can learn a lot about the behavior of domestic pigs from their wild cousins. "They still maintain a lot of their ancestral behavior," she explains.

For example, sows will sometimes lie down in their pens and make gaping movements with their mouths just before they have piglets. "She's building a nest, and you wouldn't be able to interpret that if you didn't know what she was moving in the wild."

Gonyou came into applied ethology from a background in animal science. "I wanted to stay in agriculture," he explains, "and I was looking for something that interested me." Gonyou found that something in pigs.

"You find pigs that will have a particular personality," he explains. "You'll find a pig that has to be chewing your pant leg when you're in the pen. There's a very definite pecking order. The animals are quite unique."

Gonyou's study found that odor is a big factor in pig recognition. But it's not the only factor. Pigs still act aggressively when pigs outside their group are added to the pen, even when their odor is changed. "There must be some individual recognition," concludes Gonyou.

Understanding how a pig reacts to certain situations can help humans handle them better. Walking into a pen, reaching over and touching a pig is very stressful to the animal. It's much better to approach the animal slowly, squat down and let the pig come to you.

"You need to be patient with them," says Gonyou. Gonyou says farms that employ good production skills -- like gentle handling of animals -- get higher numbers in each litter. Piglets grow faster when they aren't stressed.

Newbury says there is no excuse for deliberately harming animals. While she says the cases of deliberate abuse or neglect are few, there are some aspects of production that may impact the welfare of an animal. "How important is it to be able to perform certain types of behavior?" asks Newbury.

"If they don't perform certain types of behavior, what are the consequences?"

If animal behaviorists can come up with numbers to illustrate the consequence of certain actions, then producers can justify the cost of changing their management. "They can't afford to take a whole lot of risks," explains Newbury, "but in research, we can."

Gonyou says it's often challenging to present his research findings to other animal scientists. "Few have studied animal behavior," he explains. "I'm dealing with a group that hasn't studied what I've studied."

There are only a dozen people in North America who've studied the behavior of farm animals. "We really need to prove ourselves," Gonyou says. He likes the challenge -- it makes for an interesting and enjoyable field.

Newbury says she feels quite privileged to do the work she does. "Every time you see animals, there's always something new to discover."

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