The willingness of silver foxes to “pay” for social contact

Janne Karin Brodin

From an animal welfare point of view it is important to examine the needs of farm animals because such knowledge is important for constructing adequate housing systems and to generate appropriate recommendations on how to house the animals. Where farmed silver foxes are concerned, our knowledge about their social motivations is limited and research aimed at examining this in more detail is therefore warranted

A good starting point when we want to cast light on the needs of animals is to measure their motivation for getting access to various benefits or for acting out a specific behaviour: The stronger the motivation, the more important it is for the animal to have this need covered. A frequently used technique with other species of farm animals is to let the animal act out a learned behaviour (operant response, e.g. chain pulling or lever pressing) in order to get access to a benefit. The operant response functions as the “price” the animal has to pay. The price for access (number or intensity of the response) will be gradually increased, and the animal’s “willingness to pay” can be used as a measure for their motivation. For comparison purposes, the animal’s motivation to feed may be used.

The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate an operant method for measuring the willingness to pay for social interaction in silver foxes. We wanted a method that allowed the fox to decide when and for how long it wanted to visit with another fox, plus that the foxes were to have undisturbed social contact. Furthermore, it was important to register the behaviour of the fox when it visited with another fox, in order to evaluate why the fox wanted contact and whether the contact was favourable to both individuals.

The results show that we succeeded in developing an operant apparatus for measuring the fox’s motivation for undisturbed social contact with a neighbour fox. The apparatus allowed the fox to pay through pulling a loop to go to visit, and to return to its own home cage without being followed by its neighbour. The neighbour fox also had sole access to its own home cage, which it used regularly. As a measure for motivation (willingness to pay) we used the maximum price which the fox was willing to pay, and the validity of this measure was evaluated by letting three male silver foxes pay to seek out three different benefits of presumed varying importance: food, vixens in heat and other males. We consider the maximum price a valid measure, as the foxes’ willingness to pay was highest for food and vixens, and lowest for other males.

In the last study, we found that young silver fox vixens’ willingness to pay to go visit with another young vixen was 38% of the willingness to pay for food. At the first few meetings between the vixens they fought to establish the dominance relationship. In subsequent days, we did not see any serious aggression, and the meetings were characterised by several mutually beneficial behaviours, such as mutual grooming, rest and also play. This shows that social contact may be beneficial to young silver fox vixens when they also have the possibility to withdraw.

We conclude that the apparatus is a good way to measure social motivation in silver foxes. In future studies, it can be used to measure social motivation in silver foxes of varying ages and sexes, and with differences in social experience and status. In addition to operant measure for motivation, it is important to map foxes’ behaviour in order to separate social motivation from possible aggressive motivations.

Updated: 16.05.11
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