We had a brilliant talk yesterday @NottinghamVets from @RoyalVetCollege Dr Charlotte Burn on the biological underpinnings of boredom in animals and it’s potential overlooked importance in welfare as part of our @UFAW_1926 LINK seminar series. Highlights in this thread. 
Boredom is a very low arousal state, associated with seeking of alternative stimulation and high arousal.
Chronic boredom in humans is linked to sensation-seeking, drug use, gambling and risk prone behaviour. Also associated with depression, apathy and low self esteem. It has been so far overlooked in animal science due to criticism of being ‘too human’
We do know that animals prefer to avoid barren environments and avoid monotony. Rats will even work to add variety to their environment even if the monotonous thing is their ‘favourite’ or preferred choice and the ‘new’ stimuli is otherwise aversive.
Mink in unenriched cages lie awake and inactive: Meagher & Mason (2012) tested multiple alternative hypotheses including depression. Findings were more consistent with boredom.
Due to shared neural circuitry ‘boredom’ as a welfare problem is most likely in vertebrates which have a complex natural history and generalist niche and when unable to perform evolutionarily relevant behaviour: i.e cows unlikely to be bored when eating grass 16hrs a day
Although octopuses don’t have the same neural circuitry as vertebrates their niche involves exploration, they have high levels of intelligence and value complexity, so may also be able to feel chronic boredom.
Individual differences in boredom propensity in humans make it very challenging to show whether animals actually get bored as we can’t even classify a standard ‘boredom paradigm’ in humans.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try! An operational definition is suggested along with possible indicators of aversion to monotony and suboptimal arousal for future studies
To read more see Charlotte’s paper here: sciencedirect.com/science/articl… and Chapter 7 of Animal Welfare 3rd Edition
