Body Contacts and Social Interactions in Captive Odontocetes Are Influenced by the Context: An Implication for Welfare Assessment

摘要

Even though species differ in terms of personality traits and responses to external stimuli, welfare-oriented studies conducted on odontocetes are mostly focused on bottlenose dolphins ( ). Odontocetes are highly social animals; social behaviors are therefore interesting to investigate in relation to welfare. Video recording was conducted over a year on three groups of captive odontocetes, to record the frequency of social behaviors across different contexts. Captive odontocetes’ social behaviors, such as pectoral contacts, other body contacts, agonistic interactions or social play were influenced by the context and the patterns observed in this study suggest their potential usefulness to assess welfare in these animals, and that species and groups might react differently to a stimulus.