Tail biting is a serious welfare concern in pig production. It not only causes distress for victims, but may occur where pigs are unable to cope, and become biters. An animal's ability to cope with stressful situations may vary between individuals, but the behavioral response could be consistent across different fear eliciting situations. We exposed 75 pigs to open field (OF) and novel object (NO) tests at 14 weeks of age. Within each pen of pigs (n = 16 pens, 55 pigs/pen), 6 pigs were selected for testing using the following criteria: 3 pigs that had severe bite wounds (BITTEN), 1 confirmed biter (BITER), 1 pig which could be easily approached and trained to provide a saliva sample (BOLD) and 1 pig which was extremely evasive, and was unable to be trained to willingly provide a saliva sample (SHY). Given that responses may be consistent in different scenarios, we hypothesized that SHY pigs would display more characteristics of a fear response (i.e., less movement in the open field, more time spent by the door, and longer latency to approach the novel object) than human BOLD pigs. We also hypothesized that BITTEN pigs would behave similarly to SHY and BITERS similarly to BOLD. The BOLD and BITER pigs spent more time exploring (P < 0.05) and less time by the door (P < 0.01) than the BITTEN and SHY pigs. Although there was an overall increase in cortisol level from before to after the tests (P < 0.001), this was only significant for BITTEN (P < 0.001) and SHY (P < 0.05) pigs. Therefore, as hypothesized, for several measures, BOLD, and BITER pigs behaved similarly, and differently to SHY and BITTEN. However, the low sample size potentially meant that for several measures, although numeric differences were in the direction hypothesized, there were no statistical differences. Further work in which a greater number of BITER pigs were included in the sample, may elucidate our hypotheses more clearly, as to whether responses to fear tests in pigs could be associated with the likelihood of being a tail biter, or victim.

咬尾是养猪生产中严重的福利问题。它不仅给受害者带来痛苦，而且可能在猪无法应付并变得刺痛的地方发生。动物应对压力情况的能力可能因人而异，但行为反应在引起恐惧的不同情况下可能是一致的。在14周龄时，我们对75头猪进行了开放野外（OF）和新对象（NO）测试。在每头猪内ñ= 16笔，每头55头猪），使用以下标准选择6头进行测试：3头咬伤严重的猪（BITTEN），1头确认咬伤（BITER），1头易于接近并经过训练可提供的猪唾液样本（BOLD）和1头极易逃避且不能接受训练以自愿提供唾液样本（SHY）的猪。考虑到不同情况下反应可能是一致的，我们假设SHY猪会表现出比恐惧反应更多的特征（即，空旷地上的移动更少，门所花费的时间更多，接近新颖物体的等待时间更长）。人类的大胆猪。我们还假设BITTEN猪的行为类似于SHY，BITERS的行为类似于BOLD。BOLD和BITER猪花了更多时间探索（P <0.05）并减少了门的时间（P<0.01）比BITTEN和SHY猪。尽管从测试之前到测试之后皮质醇水平总体上有所提高（P <0.001），这仅对BITTEN有意义（P <0.001）和SHY（P<0.05）猪。因此，按照假设，对于几种措施，BOLD和BITER猪的行为与SHY和BITTEN相似，但不同。但是，低样本量可能意味着对于几种度量，尽管数值差异在假设的方向上，但没有统计差异。进一步的工作将更多的BITER猪包括在样本中，可能会更清楚地阐明我们的假设，即对猪的恐惧测试的反应是否可能与被咬尾巴或受害的可能性相关。