Preliminary results on a sequenzial approach to qualitative behaviour assessment in buffaloes

We aimed to verify whether the qualitative behaviour assessment (QBA) is able to detect the behavioural fluctuations occurring in animals during the observation period. An 8-member panel with a varied experience in animal behaviour was used. The panel was briefly trained on the temporal dominance of sensations (TDS) procedure and subsequently observed the behaviour of 4 buffalo heifers in 4 videos lasting 2 min each following this pro- cedure. Each video was obtained by assembling two clips portray- ing the same animal in two different conditions: home indoor pen (1 min) and novel outdoor paddock (1 min). Two videos started with the animal in the outdoor environment and two oth- ers in the opposite order. Six behavioural descriptors were cho- sen from a previous work conducted on the same animals: calm, active, curious, nervous, shy and apathetic. TDS consists in pre- senting to the panellist the list of behavioural descriptors on a computer screen along with each clip. Each assessor was asked to select the dominant descriptor, which was considered as dom- inant when it gained most of the attention of the observer. Each time the observer felt the behaviour changed, he/she scored the new dominant descriptor until the behaviour ended. Each clip was observed 4 times by each observer (4 replications) in a ranomised order at 24-h intervals. For each point of time, the pro- portion of runs (subject x replication) for which a given descrip- tor was assessed as dominant (dominance rate >30%) was com- puted. Results showed a satisfactory agreement among observers and replications. The observers clearly discriminated the first from the second half of each video. Calm and apathetic were dominant indoors, nervous and active were dominant out- doors, whereas curious was used in both conditions (Figure 1). In addition, the combination QBA-TDS showed how the behav- iour changed in time (e.g. habituation to the novel environment) in outdoor conditions (the dominance of nervous and active at the start switched to calm at the end in 3 out of 4 videos), where- as indoor animals showed reduced behavioural variations, possi- bly because they were already habituated to those conditions, thus they did not have to change their way to interact with the environment.