Evaluating enrichment use in group-housed rhesus macaques (): A machine learning approach.

Environmental enrichment programmes are widely used to improve welfare of captive and laboratory animals, especially non-human primates. Monitoring enrichment use over time is crucial, as animals may habituate and reduce their interaction with it. In this study we aimed to monitor the interaction with enrichment items in groups of rhesus macaques (), each consisting of an average of ten individuals, living in a breeding colony.

The daily experience of hunger in UK females with and without food insecurity.

Food insecurity (FI) is associated with increased mortality risk, depression, and obesity in females in high-income countries, but causal mechanisms remain unclear. FI is often assumed to lead to increased levels of hunger. However, quantitative evidence describing daily experiences of hunger in FI is lacking.

Dairy cows' motivation to nurse their calves.

When weaning offspring, female mammals limit nursing opportunities. This study aimed to investigate whether imposing a gradual reduction in daily contact time, by separating cows from their calves as an attempt to stimulate weaning, reduced dairy cows' motivation to nurse their calves. For seven weeks, 84 Holstein-Friesian cow-calf pairs were housed with either full-time (23 h contact/d), part-time (10 h contact/d), or no contact.

Maternal behavior of dairy cows and suckling behavior of dairy calves in different cow-calf contact conditions.

Cow-calf contact has been suggested as an alternative to the common practice of early separation of dairy cow and calf. Increasing cow-calf contact poses challenges by reducing the machine milk yield and increasing separation stress. Part-time cow-calf contact may prove more feasible than full-time contact for farmers but may affect the maternal behavior of the cows.

Experimental biology can inform our understanding of food insecurity.

Food insecurity is a major public health issue. Millions of households worldwide have intermittent and unpredictable access to food and this experience is associated with greater risk for a host of negative health outcomes. While food insecurity is a contemporary concern, we can understand its effects better if we acknowledge that there are ancient biological programs that evolved to respond to the experience of food scarcity and uncertainty, and they may be particularly sensitive to food insecurity during development.