Simple year-round cage enrichments for mink
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Subjects were 2,400 kits from 600 families, on 3 commercial farms in Ontario, pair-housed from July-December. 75% were Blacks, 25% Demis. Two male-female pairs were used per family: one was provided with stimuli for interaction; the other housed in standard conditions. The supplemented cages received a golf ball, plastic wiffle ball, and hanging device to tug /chew (hose or plastic chain) (costing under $1.50 a cage). Behaviour, temperament, mortality rates and pelt quality were assessed. Supplemented kits were found to play more than their non-enriched siblings. Social play (defined as ‘rough and tumble’ interactions without screaming or hard biting) was unaffected, but enhanced object and locomotor play led to significantly higher overall levels in supplemented juveniles. There was no evidence that the added objects increased aggression. The added objects also had no effects on mortality. In stick tests in December, supplemented mink were significantly less likely to be fearful than their standard-housed siblings. When scored for reactions to the live-grading of their fur in November, supplemented mink were significantly less likely to scream than their standard-housed siblings. Across Blacks, the added objects did not seem to affect fur quality, but in Demis, supplemented mink were significantly likely to receive better live-grades than their standard-housed siblings. For pelted subjects, tails of dead animals were inspected for signs of tail-chewing/clipping. Typically 1 cm or less of the tailtip was affected. However, 20 mink across all three farms showed damage to 2 cm or more the tail, and 14 of these were standard-housed rather than supplemented: a trend to significance. Furthermore, pooling all instances of tail-chewing/-biting together, 7.9% supplemented mink had sucked/bitten tails, compared to 11.5 standard-housed: a significant effect. The pelts of all experimental mink were bar-coded for auction, and prices will be obtained in summer 2012. Data during mating showed that supplemented males were more effective maters than standard mink (e.g. showing longer copulations). Subjects selected for breeding have also been evaluated for stereotypic behaviour and faecal cortisol metabolite output, and for whelping success: data still to be analysed. Overall, these findings to date show that simple, long-term, cheap additions to standard cages can act as effective environmental enrichments for farmed mink.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".