Enhancing welfare through cognitive assessment of parenting skills in captive managed animals

Context. All mammals have a period of extreme vulnerability during early development. Providing an appropriate social environment both maximizing parental care and minimizing the risk of aggression from others is a serious challenge for the management of captive animals. Primates have particularly long periods of maternal care, and the quality of their early social environment is important for healthy development. Every year, approximately 100,000 primates are used for biomedical research, with rhesus macaques the most common model species. In captivity, however, mothers can neglect or abuse their offspring (Maestripieri and Carroll,1998), and male adolescents are at higher risk of being attacked from group mates compared to adults (Massey et al., 2022). In humans, we have evolved a high sensitivity to infant characteristics (Kringelbach et al., 2016), particularly infant faces, which play a key role in appropriate social interactions with infants. For example, infant faces are highly attractive and command attention from adults, and the extent of attentional bias toward infants is related to the quality of interaction parents have with their infants (e.g., Lucion et al., 2017). Understanding how the perception of infants impacts behaviour towards infants in other primates is critical to both understanding its fundamental adaptive nature and for the welfare of animals born in captivity. Optimizing the social environment for breeding groups is key to improving the survival, welfare and health of managed animals by adhering to the 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement) for more ethical use of animals. The challenge this project addresses. Predicting how mothers and other members of the group will behave towards infants is critical for high-standard animal management. Poor decisions when managing breeding cohorts can be costly in both welfare and economic terms. Non-invasive cognitive tasks have the potential to serve as a unique and predictive measure to understand and manage the social interaction infants will experience with their parents and other group mates. Aims and objectives. In this project, I aim to understand how perceptual responses to infant stimuli are associated with the actual treatment of infants in captive breeding colonies of rhesus macaques. I will conduct non-invasive experiments at the Medical Research Council Centre for Macaques (CFM), a primate breeding unit for biomedical supply housing approximately 170 monkeys. I will use eye-tracking to examine the animals' spontaneous visual attention and social expectations toward infants. First, I will study whether monkeys exhibit visual attraction to infants compared to adults (Experiment 1). Second, I will study whether monkeys show surprised behaviour (e.g., longer looking time) when they observe a video depicting unexpected events such as an infant being threatened by adults (Experiment 2). Then, I will analyse whether and how the individual differences in the performance of the cognitive tasks are related to their actual behavioural outcomes toward infants (e.g., parenting, aggression) based on existing long-term data. Potential applications and benefits. This project includes both an investigation of the fundamental mechanisms of infant recognition and a direct application to animal welfare. The findings will provide insight into predicting future ‘good mothers’ and prevent the formation of groups including individuals at risk of harming infants, addressing the 3Rs principles for captive primate management. The project is novel by combining investigation of both cognitive mechanisms and behavioural outcomes to generate recommendations for the improvement of captive primate welfare in biomedical facilities.