Conditioned approach-avoidance responses to humans: The ability of pigs to associate feeding and aversive social experiences in the presence of humans with humans

Abstract

Since there is a number of common industry husbandry procedures conducted by stockpersons that may have rewarding or aversive elements for pigs, pigs may learn to associate these rewarding or aversive elements of a procedure with the handler conducting the procedure. Therefore, because of this second-order conditioning, changes in the behavioural response of pigs to humans may limit the productivity and welfare of pigs through a stress response. Experiment 1 was conducted to examine whether sexually unreceptive female pigs regularly introduced to boars in their accommodation pens for oestrus detection learn to associate the aversive elements of this procedure with the experimenter conducting..