Estudo quantitativo de etogramas para suínos em crescimento e terminação

Abstract

Animal behavior is the way the organism expresses itself in response to the environmental conditions imposed on it. Another factor that interferes with its behavior is the circadian rhythm, a mechanism in which pigs adapt their physiological functions according to the factors of the day. The study of these behaviors takes place by the application of ethograms, therefore, according to the time of day, pigs may express different behaviors. The objective of this work was to study quantitatively the methodologies of application of ethograms in the collection of behavioral data of growing and finishing pigs. In the research of the data were evaluated works that analyzed the behavior of pigs in the phase of growth and finishing. After the analysis of the articles it was not possible to establish a standard regarding the data collection methods, for that it was necessary to develop terminologies in order to standardize them, as well as the development of tools to understand the experimental procedure. Through the development of tools during the work it was possible to standardize the data from experimental studies with pigs and to quantitatively analyze the methodologies of application of the ethograms in the data collection of growing and finishing pig behaviors. The values differ greatly between the studies evaluated, while Machado et. al (2017) reached values of 33.34% of the experiment time in effective swine observation, there were studies such as Morgan et. al (1998) that reached very low values in relation to the proportion of time observed in correspondence to the total experiment (0.005%). The methodologies of application of the ethograms reached an average representativity of 4.17% and used on average 14 h 24 min 48 s as effective observation period of the animals. The quantitative study of the methodologies of the application of the ethograms in the behavioral data collection of growing and finishing pigs was possible through the development of the terminology coding, fractal diagram, spreadsheets and the use of the developed equations.