Fighting and friendship: how dominance, sex, and group size affect free-ranging feral cattle social behavior

Group living confers crucial survival and reproductive advantages to individuals, such as decreased predation, improved information sharing, and mating opportunities. Group size, composition and resource availability can affect sociality and individual behaviors, including the distribution of affiliation and aggression. Cattle are social ungulates, but most research on how group characteristics affect individuals is conducted on farms and may not be applicable to free-ranging populations. We used all-occurrence sampling to record affiliation, dominance interactions and aggression in five free-ranging mixed-sex feral cattle herds (ranging in size from 9 to 61 animals) in Hong Kong, examining the relationships between group size, supplementary food provisioning, individual characteristics and social behaviors. More dominant male cattle performed more affiliation, with males directing affiliation preferentially towards females. Females received more affiliation than males, and affiliation duration increased with group size. Females in smaller groups received more aggression, and females in provisioned herds received more aggression than non-provisioned females. Our results indicate that cattle herd characteristics and social organization have important sex-specific effects on its members. These social dynamics highlight the importance of understanding the distribution of aggression in mixed-sex groups, and how group social structure can asymmetrically influence behavior patterns.