Recent research conducted at the University of British Columbia’s Animal Welfare Program has investigated empathy in dairy calves. In this study, published in PLoS ONE, calves witnessed two ‘demonstrators’ pen mates recover from different procedures: one from a common painful surgery (disbudding, which is the prevention of horn growth by cauterisation) and the other from a sham procedure. ‘Witness’ calves spent more time near, and paid more attention to, the calf in pain. In additional testing in the absence of demonstrators, witness calves also tended to avoid the pen associated with pain. These results suggest that dairy calves display empathy towards another calf in pain.
Read article: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0232897
