In light of animal welfare and for economical reasons, farm animals are often group housed. This makes social interaction and hierarchy interesting topics for behavioral research. Noldus offers several products of interest for this kind of research: The Observer XT, MatMan, and Theme.

• Score detailed social behavior rapidly and calculate statistics, such as the total duration of allogrooming.
• Score behavior live or from previously recorded video files.
• Playback those parts of the video in which a lot of interactions occurred, replay it in slow-motion, and edit or add events.
• Detect behavioral sequences and associations between behaviors in complex behavioral structures.
• Calculate linear dominance hierarchies and rank individuals within a group.
• Select data based upon independent variable, animal, behavior, or observation and only subject those data to analysis.

Introduction
Understanding social behavior is increasingly important in farm animal husbandry as more animals are housed in groups rather than in individual stables or pens. There may be economic reasons for such housing, but most importantly, group rearing allows for social interaction during early development. This has been shown to be important in the development of normal social responses later in life.

Combine The Observer® XT, MatMan™, and Theme™ with our computer hardware and services to create the perfect solution for collecting and analyzing social behaviors in farm animals. The Observer XT allows you to manually score detailed behaviors, while MatMan and Theme give you the opportunity to take data analysis to the next level by detecting complex relationships between the observed behaviors. Our knowledgeable staff will be happy to help you find what you need for your research.

How it works
Your experiment starts with designing a coding scheme (ethogram) in The Observer XT. This coding scheme contains each behavior and each animal you want to study, including their corresponding codes. While scoring, you still have the option to edit this coding scheme.

You can choose to score the behaviors live, while they occur, or to record a video and score offline. Scoring from video provides the advantage that you can playback the video and code missed events or check if an event was scored at the correct time. Live scoring gives you the possibility to take events into account that would not be caught on camera. You can also use The Observer XT to combine the best of both and score live while acquiring video at the same time. Scoring simply takes place by pressing the corresponding key of the keyboard or clicking on the behavior in the ethogram, while the Observer XT automatically adds time stamps.

You can define independent variables for each observation, such as the age of an animal or the location at which the observation takes place. Add so-called ‘modifiers’ to add extra information to the beha-viors. When investigating social interaction in chickens, the behavior ‘peck group member’ can be extended with the modifier ‘body part’ and modifier values ‘head’, ‘neck’, ‘tail’, and ‘body’.

Use Pocket Observer on a handheld computer, PDA, or smart phone to add even more flexibility to your research. We offer a variety of handheld computers that are suitable for various environmental conditions. Score behaviors live, and then import your observations into your main project. The Observer XT allows for easy integration and synchronization of data streams: you can visualize and analyze your data as if it was gathered simultaneously.

When you have completed your observations, you can select your data based on subjects, behaviors, observations, or independent variables. Use The Observer XT to visualize your observations, or calculate a number of statistics, such as the total duration a foal was playing with other foals. Or import data into MatMan, an add-on for Microsoft Excel that allows for the manipulation and analysis of matrices. MatMan uses frequencies of aggressive and submissive encounters between animals in a group to examine the presence of a linear dominance hierarchy. This way, you can examine which animal dominates another animal or which one is dominated by all other animals.

You can take data analysis one step further: data obtained with The Observer XT can be imported into Theme. This program can find patterns that are impossible to detect with the naked eye or basic statistical programs. Theme detects statistically significant patterns based on the timing of events relative to each other. If two behaviors are linked by a certain time interval more often than expected by chance, Theme defines them as a T-pattern. This way, it is able to detect repeating sequences in behavior, such as the sequence of pecking in a group of chickens.