Lilia Thays Sonoda, Michaela Fels, Sally Rauterberg, Stefano Viazzi, Gunel Ismayilova, Maciej Oczak, Claudia Bahr, Marcella Guarino, Erik Vranken, Daniel Berckmans, Jörg Hartung
It is known that pigs raised in enriched environments express less aggressive behaviour. For this reason, a new method of cognitive environmental enrichment was experimented at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Germany. In the first phase, 78 suckling piglets were trained to learn the link between a sound given by an electronic feeder and a feed reward in the form of chocolate candies during a period of 8 days. In the second phase, the same piglets were used in resident-intruder tests to verify the potential of the feeding system to interrupt aggressive behaviour...
2013: ISRN Veterinary Science