ArticleScientific reports2020
Play fighting social networks do not predict injuries from later aggression.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Early-Life Socialization Enhances Social Competence and Alters Affiliative Preference in Piglets.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Groups of familiar male rats form unstable partner preferences when play fighting during the juvenile period.iScience · 2025Article
- Classification of resilience to weaning stress using cortisol patterns and associations with growth and behavior in Yorkshire gilts.Journal of animal science · 2025Article
- Juvenile social play predicts adult reproductive success in male bottlenose dolphins.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Evaluating social network metrics as indicators of tail injury caused by tail biting in growing-finishing pigs (Frontiers in veterinary science · 2024Article
- Play Behavior Varies with Age, Sex, and Socioecological Context in Wild, Immature Orangutans (International journal of primatology · 2024Article
- Social behavior in farm animals: Applying fundamental theory to improve animal welfare.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2022Review
- Collective self-assessment in banded mongoose intergroup contests.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Early play fighting mimics later aggression in many species, and may, therefore, be expected to reduce costs from later aggressive interactions. Using social network analysis (SNA) the effect of a central play fighting network position on later skin lesions from aggression was assessed in domestic pigs. Piglets (n = 263) were kept in litter groups or socialised pre-weaning with another litter to enhance play fighting experience. Play fighting was recorded for 1.5 h per day over 6 days pre-weaning. Play fighting network centrality was quantified using measures of individual network position and entire network structure (degree, eigenvector, betweenness, clustering coefficient). Skin lesions from aggression were counted after a dyadic contest and at 24 h and 3 weeks following group mixing. Pigs with play fighting interactions with many partners experienced fewer lesions from the dyadic contest (in-degree, p = 0.01) and tended to received fewer lesions 3 weeks after group mixing (degree, p = 0.088) but no other play fighting centrality measures affected the number of lesions at any point. The benefits of play fighting were therefore limited to specific aggressive social contexts. The tendency of socialised piglets to play fight with non-littermates did not affect subsequent lesions. We advocate the use of SNA over approaches that only consider dyadic interactions to further our understanding of the influence of early social group interactions on later life experience.
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