Publication details
Cattle North-South alignment & herd density
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Alignment is a spontaneous behavioral preference of particular body orientation that may be seen in various vertebrate or invertebrate taxa. Recently, with the aid of Google Earth application and using blinded protocol we scored positions of 2235 individuals in 74 herds. Our results are in line with the original findings of prevailing North-South orientation of grazing cattle (Begall et al. 2008; Burda et al. 2009). In addition, we found that mutual distances between individual animals within herds (the density of herds) affect their North-South preference. Evaluations of both individuals and herds showed negative correlation between degree of N-S alignment and density of herds. Between aligned and non-aligned herds, the threshold distance among animals was estimated 6-8m. We reason that while getting over this distance to the nearest partner, the relatively weak tendency to keep N-S position may be overlapped by diverse social interactions in the vicinity of other members of a herd. Although we did not test the hypothesis whether the N-S alignment of cattle is truly based on a magnetic compass sense, our work confirms the phenomenon of cattle N-S alignment and shows new data giving some insight into biological significance of alignment. Supported by GACR13-11908J |