By your side: How social support affects training duration, task performance and behaviour of pigs in a Judgement Bias Task.

ABSTRACT: Pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) and most other farmed species are social animals for whom social isolation is known to cause stress. However, their social nature is commonly ignored in behavioural and cognitive tasks, on which they are trained and tested individually, which may impact their welfare and the validity of test results. We chose the Judgement Bias Task (JBT), a promising proxy measure of affective states, to compare training duration, task performance and behaviour of pigs trained and tested in social isolation (ISO; n = 12) with pigs trained and tested with physical and visual contact to social companions through an opening covered with wire mesh (SOC; n = 12). Eleven SOC pigs and eight ISO pigs learned the task, but SOC and ISO pigs did not differ in training duration or

SUBMITTER: Kroell M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12056429 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature