STUDIES ON COGNITIVE BEHAVIOUR AND ITS EFFECT ON PERFORMANCE OF MURRAH BUFFALO CALVES
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Date
2019
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ICAR-NDRI, KARNAL
Abstract
The present research was designed to explore the cognitive performance of Murrah buffalo calves in a Y-maze discrimination task to examine the effect to weaning and housing. For this study, 24 Murrah buffalo calves were selected at birth and randomly allotted to four groups (six calves each) comprising of SG group (restricted suckling and group housed), SI group (restricted suckling and individually housed), WG group (weaned at birth and group housed) and WI group (weaned at birth and individually housed) for a period of six months. All the calves were trained with bottle feeding from first day of birth. The SG and SI group of calves had access to their mothers for 2 hours each in morning and evening milking shifts for let-down of milk (restricted suckling). However, they were fed milk only from bottles. At five weeks of age, cognitive ability of the buffalo calves was assessed in a Y- maze task, where the calves were trained to visually discriminate between two colours--white versus black--in a reward punishment task. Initially, they were rewarded with milk in a hidden feeding bottle if they chose white colour and punished with an empty bottle if they chose black colour. The calves were thought to successfully learn the task if they chose white colour 80% of the times in three consecutive sessions. After they learnt the initial task, now the reward-punishment task was reversed. They were now rewarded with milk if they chose black colour and punished with no milk if they chose white colour. The training sessions with 12 trials per session were performed twice daily during morning and evening milk feeding time. The memory of the calves was assessed after 2 months. During initial learning all the calves took more or less equal number of sessions to learn the task however, differed significantly during reversal learning. The SG group performed the best among all groups in view of their superior cognitive ability (7.5±0.48 sessions, P<0.05 and 92.01±0.28 % memory retention) which was positively correlated with growth (r=0.833, P<0.05) and immunity (r=0.892, P<0.05). Conversely, WI group performed the poorest on all the above parameters across the groups taking maximum number of sessions to learn the reversal task (12±0.70), made more wrong choices (P<0.01) and took maximum time (8.96 ±0.22 seconds, P<0.001) in decision making to reach the choice in Y-maze. The WG group was found to be second best group in view of their cognitive performance (8±0.76 sessions) and memory retention (92.07±0.27 %), however, it was found to exhibit more cross-sucking behaviour, reduced growth, had weak immunity and remained emotionally stressful. The SI group was found to be inferior to SG and WG groups in terms of fearfulness to novel objects taking longer latency time (163.73±44.55 seconds, P<0.01) and showed less exploratory behaviour (2.40±0.41 seconds, P<0.01) inside the maze, but was superior than WI group in terms of cognitive performance (9±0.87 sessions), memory retention (90.01±0.31%), growth and immunity. Irrespective of housing conditions the WG and WI groups exhibited more number (P<0.001) of ear posture changes at the decision making point of the maze. The female calves were cognitively superior in terms of exhibiting quicker decision making capability (7.46±0.18 vs. 8.32±0.21 seconds, P<0.001) as compared to male calves. This study provides evidence for the first time that, weaning and individual housing of buffalo calves in early stage of life impairs learning and cognitive abilities, thus making them less behavioural flexible to adapt to changes. Ear postures can be used as a promising non-invasive technique for welfare assessment in buffaloes in future.