Social and spatial relationships of capybaras in a semi-confined production system

Abstract

Social and spatial relationships between individuals have been used to describe the social structure of animal species (Hinde 1983; Lee 1994), which can be defined as the organizational pattern of social relationships among group members (Lusseau et al. 2008). Understanding the relationship of an individual with conspecifics can be important in determining its social position in the dominance hierarchy (Beacham 2003). As most definitions refer to dominance as an attribute of a pattern of repeated agonistic interactions, i.e., aggression (Bernstein 1981; Drews 1993), dominance hierarchies have been extensively analyzed by quantifying dyadic agonistic interactions (Gauthreaux 1978; de Vries and Appleby 2000).