HOW do you get inside an animal’s head and assess how it’s feeling? The short answer is, you can’t. But a study on starlings has taken us one step nearer by revealing how animals change their behaviour in response to different environmental conditions. The information could improve our understanding of animal welfare.
Melissa Bateson and colleagues at Newcastle University, UK, investigated how starlings respond to different living conditions, by giving them choices designed to assess whether their outlook was “pessimistic” or “optimistic”.
Birds were trained to associate a tasty snack – a worm – with a dish with a white…
