Behavior and welfare terminology

Behavior

What animals do

Affective state

Emotional state of the animal

Affiliative

Type of behavior including positive social interactions such as grooming or play.

Agonistic

negative social interactions, i.e. competition or fighting

Social

Type of behavior involving association between members of a group

Operant conditioning

Association between the performance of a behavior and the consequences of that behavior

Classical conditioning

Learned association between an event or stimulus and another stimulus, for which the animal has an unconditioned response

Dominance hierachies

dominant/submissive relationships between animals within a group

Natural living

Being able to perform important, normal behaviors with natural elements in their environment

Nesting

Withdrawal from the group prior to parturition

Sexual and reproductive behavior

all aspects of mate choice, courtship behavior, and copulation

Feeding behavior

All aspects of how an animal searches for, selects, and ingests food

Maternal behavior

Changes in behavior leading up to parturition, discrimination and responsiveness to the young, and maternal care

Ethology

Study of innate or instinctive animal behavior in their natural surrondings

Cribbing

Behavior in horses in which they bite or hold onto objects such as posts

Pica

Craving and willinness to eat unnatural feedstuffs

Wool sucking

Prolonged suckling syndrome observed primarily in cats where they cointinue to suck on objects and perhaps knead with forepaws long after weaning

Wool chewing

Sheep that pull on their fleece and make bald spots

Stereotypies

A type of abnormal behavior with a repetitive, invariant pattern with no obvious goal or function.

Pacing

Behavior, often associated with predators in captivity, involving repetitive walking back and forth or in circles along the same path.