Animal boredom - identifying symptoms and consequences

My dog is bored. Most dog owners are familiar with this thought and zoo visitors often believe that the elephants, chimpanzees or dolphins they look at in their enclosures or tanks are bored, too. But what does being bored mean for an animal? From studies in humans we know that boredom is highly aversive and is associated with various forms of negative affect, including depression and anxiety. Boredom is often caused by barren and monotonous conditions conditions resembling the housing situations of many of our farmed, companion, zoo and lab animals that might potentially suffer from boredom. However, animal boredom has long been dismissed as a trivial concern. First studies now indicate that animals, too, demonstrate boredom-like states but what these states mean for the animal is largely unknown. The aim of our project is consequently to investigate causes and consequences of boredom-like states in the pig, a farmed animal species that is commonly housed under barren and monotonous conditions with hardly any environmental stimulation. The pig is thus a good model animal to study animal boredom. We will induce boredom by manipulating the animals housing conditions and will compare animals housed under barren and monotonous with animals housed under enriched and varying conditions. We will then test whether animals kept in barren and monotonous housing are more motivated to work for a change in the environment, are in a more negative emotional state, and feel, like bored humans, that time passes more slowly than it actually does, compared to animals kept under enriched conditions. Moreover, we will explore whether animals from the different housing conditions differ in their spontaneous behaviour by investigating their body posture, including ear positions and tail movements, while being inactive and whether animals from the barren and monotonous environment have higher levels of stress hormones compared to animals from the enriched environment. On top of this, we are interested in the question whether animals with certain personality traits are more prone to experience boredom, as it is the case in humans. This will be the first project integrating different and partly new methodological approaches answering the question what boredom-like states mean for the animal. This new insight will be of huge relevance for animal welfare as potentially many animals under human care are affected by boredom-like states.

Being bored? Identifying symptoms and consequences of chronic boredom in pigs In humans chronic boredom is highly aversive and associated with alcoholism, pathological gambling and suicide. It is caused by barren and monotonous conditions - conditions resembling the housing conditions of many farmed animals. The aim of our project was to investigate the causes and consequences of boredom in pigs, a curious species commonly housed in barren and monotonous conditions. In our project, pigs were either housed in barren standard pens (B) or in enriched and varying pens (E) and for half of the pigs the conditions changed in the middle of the study, i.e. half of the B pigs switched from B to E and vice versa. From humans we know that individuals differ in how prone they are to suffer from boredom and we thus included pigs with different personality types as assessed in a commonly applied pig personality task. In contrast to what we expected, B pigs were not more pessimistic than E pigs according to a task designed to assess mood in animals. Moreover, before the switch of housing conditions, pigs did not differ in their perception of time as assessed in a task specially designed in this project to assess time perception in pigs. However, after the switch, pigs switching from E to B tended to respond in the task in a way suggesting that time passed by more slowly for them, whereas for pigs switching from B to E time tended to pass by more quickly, a finding in line with time dragging when we are bored and time flying by when we have fun. Looking at the behaviour of the pigs, we found that B pigs were more inactive and showed more often hanging ears, a presumable sign of negative emotion in pigs, than E pigs. We currently analyse more of the pigs' behaviour as well as the data from a task aiming to differentiate between boredom, apathy and depression. Our project was the first integrating a range of methodological approaches, from which some were newly developed in the project, to study chronic boredom in pigs. Even though not all results were according to what we had hypothesised, some do tentatively indicate that B pigs might have been bored, but ongoing analysis will complement the data and help to understand the full picture. Our project was a first step towards a better understanding of animal boredom, a so far neglected, but potentially prevalent animal welfare concern in farmed pigs and beyond. The newly developed methodological approaches pave the ground for future research on boredom and other emotional states in animals.