Observational and Competitive Measures of Dominance in Rats

Abstract

Observations of social behaviors in a colony of nine male albino rats were subjected to a factor analysis which yielded evidence for a cluster of interrelated behaviors that included fighting wins, boxing, pinning losses, being groomed, not being mounted and a measure of total interactions. These observations were followed by individual pretraining for water and food competitions and paired competition tests. Factor analyses of these data indicate that pretraining measures of time spent consuming water or food and amount consumed are predictive of success in competition. Further, these analyses indicate that food and water competition are independent of one another and that water competition performance is related to a number of observational measures of social behavior, while food competition performance is not.