Science of Ethology – Volume 1, Issue 6<\/p>\n
One of the roles we play in raising livestock is that of social managers of the animals. We decide which animals live
\ntogether in a group, and when and how the group is formed. In the case of gestating sows, we decide which sows live\u00a0with each other during their period of gestation. Our default social group, the one that happens if we disregard our role as\u00a0managers, would be the breeding cohort. This would include all of the animals that were bred during a set period, which\u00a0on most farms would be a week.<\/p>\n
In previous articles, we have discussed the most common social management decisions, which involve sorting the cohort\u00a0according to one or more of the following criteria: nutritional needs, competitiveness, or experience with the housing\u00a0system (particularly ESF). The outcome of this sorting would be multiple groups, each of which is more uniform than the\u00a0original breeding cohort. Another outcome is that the groups are smaller than the cohort as a whole. These groups are\u00a0often managed as static groups, that is, no animals are added to a group once it has been formed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Science of Ethology – Volume 1, Issue 6 One of the roles we play in raising livestock is that of social managers of the animals. We decide which animals live together in a group, and when and how the group is formed. In the case of gestating sows, we decide which sows live\u00a0with each other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,928],"tags":[2826],"class_list":["post-15281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pork-insight-articles","category-welfare","tag-esf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15283,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15281\/revisions\/15283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}