Industrialization, urbanisation, rural out-migration and one of the lowest birth rates of the world have resulted in the intensification of agriculture and animal rearing activities and their concentration in certain areas.
The main crops grown in the area include cereals, pulses, fruit and vegetable crops, among others, while the main livestock rearing activities involve cattle, goats, sheep, donkeys, and chicken, with nearly all smallholders practicing mixed-cropping systems (Wiesmann et al. 2014).
There was a significant main effect of diet [F (1, 47) = 18.63, P < 0.001] on rearing activities.
After MK-801 injection, diet also proved to have a significant main effect [F (1, 46) = 14.787, P < 0.001] on rearing activities.
Further, number of grooming (licking the fur, scratching behavior, or wiping face) and rearing activities (exploratory behavior) were also manually scored in the open field for 5 min.
The reduction in rearing activities was more pronounced with increasing ventriculomegaly, p<0.01 between control and severely hydrocephalic rats, but the overall correlation was not statistically significant (F = 2.723, R-0.1335, p > 0.05, Figure 2a).
Other behaviors were normal in Pax6 rats, except for rearing activity and the light-dark choice test (data not shown).
However rearing activity was significantly lower in rSey2/+ rats than in WT (two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures (genotype × time); main effect of factor 'genotype': F(1) = 6.54, P<0.02; Fig. 1D).
In the present study, we further examined behaviors of rSey2/+ rats and revealed that they exhibited abnormality in social interaction (more aggression and withdrawal) in addition to impairment in rearing activity and in fear-conditioned memory.
Meanwhile, vitamin A depletion mice showed hypersensitivity of rearing activity to MK-801.
Although rearing activity was correlated with ventricular enlargement, the overall association was not statistically significant.
