Maternal Behavior in Ruminants
Deepandita Barman1 and Arunoday Das2
1Assistant Professor, Department of LPM, LCVSC, Assam Agricultural University
2Assistant Professor, Department of ARGO, LCVSC, Assam Agricultural University
Maternal behaviour occupies a central position in the lives of mother and offspring because it is the behaviour of females prior to, during and immediately after partition which include bonding between mother and young. For the offspring, the behavior of the mother is critical, not only for life itself but for adjustment to the environment into which it is born; the mother is the chief source of learning in animals. Most of the available literature on maternal behaviour comes only from studies with sheep, but the basic patterns of behaviour in ewes, cows, does and mare are very similar. Each animal species has a characteristic way of performing certain functions and it rarely departs from them. It is called behaviour pattern, and its study called as Ethology. Its nature is chiefly determined by heredity but it can also be modified by learning and training, and this is the reason, why we Homo sapiens successfully domesticated the farm animals.
The critical period after parturition during which mother will form a bond with her offspring is short. For few hours during this period, maternal behavior is under hormonal control but after that the newborn has to provide cues that stimulate the mother to remain maternal. In sheep and goat, the odour of lamb and kid is crucial in which this period seems to be less than 5 hrs whereas in cattle it lasts upto 3 hrs only after parturition. After this, if there has been no contact since birth with any young, there is a rapid decline in maternal interest in newborn, with increasing aggression towards the young when it approaches.
However, only a short period of contact (<30 min) is needed to establish a bond which enables the mother to identify its own offspring from others. It appears that in this initial period a ewe, doe, cow or mare that has given birth approaches any young animal and will become attached to it. This explains why lamb swapping occurs when two ewes lamb close together at the same time. The attached is learned, not imprinted as once believed. In goats, it is now known that during this critical period the kid is ‘labelled’ by the mother through licking and suckling it. The ‘labels’ are presumably the odour of the doe’s saliva and her milk. After this period, the young will be accepted even after several hours’ separation. They have the ability to identify its own offspring from others is developed in all species within hours of parturition and is dependent on the odour of young such as smelling the anal-genital area usually makes the final identification. The field of maternal behavior further needs to be studied and discussed in various animals.
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