IS REDUCED AFFILIATIVE RATHER THAN INCREASED AGONISTIC BEHAVIOR ASSOCIATED WITH DISPERSAL IN RED FOXES

The extent of chewing on plastic ear tags was used as an indirect measure of the cumulative affiliative experiential history of red foxes, Vulpes vulpes, living in the city of Bristol, U.K. Tags were chewed by other foxes during social grooming, and the teeth marks left by animals with milk or permanent teeth were scored separately. Fewer adult dog foxes than females had tags chewed by cubs, but of those that did, the level of chewing was not different between males and females. The level of tag chewing by adult foxes on non-dispersing adult females was greater than for non-dispersing males, indicating that the females are more closely bonded to the social group. The lower level of adult chewing on the tags of dispersing adults suggests that decreased levels of grooming by adult foxes are associated with adult dispersal. For cubs, there was a strong negative relationship between affiliative behaviour with littermates during the first 13 weeks of life and future dispersal behaviour of male foxes, although there was no such relationship for females, suggesting that the social factors acting on dispersing females occur later in life. These results support the hypothesis of Bekoff (1977, Am. Nat., 111, 715-732). The value of such an indirect approach for monitoring affiliative behaviour in elusive species is discussed. © 1992 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.