Conflicting hypotheses exist about the contribution of individual pigs to the development of a tail-biting outbreak, but there is limited quantitative information to support or dismiss them. This study aims to quantify the development of tail-biting behaviour at pen and individual piglet level, before and after the first visible tail damage. Video recordings of 14 pens with tail-biting outbreak...

Intrinsic and extrinsic neuromodulation are both thought to be responsible for the flexibility of the neural circuits (central pattern generators) that control rhythmic behaviors. Because the two forms of modulation have been studied in different circuits, it has been difficult to compare them directly. We find that the central pattern generator for biting in Aplysia is modulated both extrinsic...

In this paper, we discuss the reduction of errortrellises for tail-biting convolutional codes. In the case where some column of a parity-check matrix has a monomial factor D, we show that the associated tail-biting error-trellis can be reduced by cyclically shifting the corresponding error-subsequence by l (i.e., the power of D) time units. We see that the resulting reduced error-trellis is aga...

Tail biting represents both a major animal welfare and economic problem for the pig industry with losses due to reduced weight gain, increased on-farm veterinary treatment, culling and carcass condemnation. Tail biting has a multifactorial origin. It is known to be sporadic, making outbreaks difficult to predict and understand, even within the same facilities and under similar management system...

UNLABELLED We examined the effects of systemically administered gabapentin on flinching and biting/licking behaviors produced by 2.5% formalin in the rat, compared these with those of amitriptyline, and determined the effects of combinations of gabapentin with amitriptyline. Gabapentin produced a dose-related inhibition of Phase 2, but not Phase 1, flinching and biting/licking behaviors. In con...

The problem of tail biting has probably been around for as long as pigs have been raised indoors. A recent review of the literature cites mention of the problem going back as far as 1896 but reports of tail-biting first appeared in veterinary journals in the 1940's (SchroderPetersen and Simonsen, 2001). While the causes and "remedies" for tail biting are often discussed in veterinary texts, jou...

Onychophagia is defined as chronic nail biting behaviour, which usually starts during childhood. Onychotillomania results from recurrent picking and manicuring of the fingernails and/or toenails, leading to visual shortening and/or estraction of nails. The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of onychophagia and onychotillomania in young adults, and the comorbidity of these conditions...