Fighting and friendship: sociodemographic factors and provisioning affect feral cattle behaviour

Group living confers crucial survival and reproductive advantages for individuals, with group size, composition and resource availability affecting individual fitness, sociality and behaviour. Both sociodemographic and anthropogenic factors influence behaviour, with social organisation and individual characteristics shaping time budgets and affecting the distribution of affiliative and aggressive interactions. Cattle, Bos taurus, are social ungulates, but the majority of cattle research is conducted on farms and may not be an accurate representation of their more naturalistic social structures. We investigated the relationships between sociodemographic factors (sex, dominance and group size), anthropogenic factors (supplementary provisioning), and social behaviours in free-ranging, feral cattle. We analysed social relationships (dominance, affiliation, aggression, and global social network values) for cattle living in five mixed-sex groups (ranging from 9 to 63 animals per group). We found that more dominant cattle had more affiliative partners, performed allogrooming for longer, and performed more affiliation. Females received more affiliation than males, and males directed affiliation preferentially towards females, with 258 male-to-female interactions and 145 male-to-male interactions. Females performed less aggression in larger groups, and animals in provisioned groups received more aggression. Our results indicate that cattle group social organisation has important sex-specific effects on its members. These social dynamics highlight the importance of understanding the distribution of interactions in mixed-sex groups, and how sociodemographic factors can asymmetrically influence behaviour. © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.