Preliminary results on a sequential approach to qualitative behaviour assessment in buffaloes.

We aimed to verify whether 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 procedure. Each video was obtained by assembling two clips portraying 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 others in the opposite order. Six behavioural descriptors were chosen from a previous work conducted on the same animals: “calm”, “active”, “curious”, “nervous”, “shy” and “apathetic”. TDS consists in presenting 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 dominant 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 randomised order at 24-h intervals. For each point of time, the proportion of runs (subject x replication) for which a given descriptor was assessed as dominant (dominance rate >30%) was computed. 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 outdoors, whereas “curious” was used in both conditions (Figure 1). In addition, the combination QBA-TDS showed how the behaviour 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), whereas indoor animals showed reduced behavioural variations, possibly because they were already habituated to those conditions, thus they did not have to change their way to interact with the environment.