Clicker Training as an Applied Refinement Measure in Chickens
Gordon Mählis, Anne Kleine, Dörte Lüschow, Alexander Bartel, Mechthild Wiegard, Christa Thoene-Reineke, Melanie L Graham · 2023
Read Clicker Training as an Applied Refinement Measure in Chickens by Gordon Mählis, Anne Kleine, Dörte Lüschow, Alexander Bartel, Mechthild Wiegard, Christa Thoene-Reineke, Melanie L Graham (2023) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-10740453.txt.
Description
Gordon Mählis leads a team of seven authors clicker-training laboratory chickens to test whether positive training softens the stress of being handled for science. Chickens are prey animals, and routine procedures like blood sampling are assumed stressful. A three-week clicker program was evaluated with blood and saliva stress hormones, behavior in a novel-area test, and fecal output.
The training looked like a genuine refinement, enriching the birds' husbandry cognitively. But three weeks was not enough to durably blunt responses to prolonged stressors, and routine blood sampling proved less stressful than assumed, complicating the baseline. The authors call for longer training periods and higher-stress test situations, and remind experimenters to weigh training time against expected stress.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Gordon Mählis, Anne Kleine, Dörte Lüschow, Alexander Bartel, Mechthild Wiegard, Christa Thoene-Reineke, Melanie L Graham |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2023 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 58 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |