Scoring reflex actions

Once we have learned how to "tickle" animals to stimulate a variety of reflex actions, we can consider how to score these actions.  Individual reflex actions can be scored either as present or absent, or can be scored according to their strength of response. We might think that scoring a reflex action by its strength would be the most useful, as it gives a continuous range of values from full strength in large powerful animals through weaker in healthy smaller animals, to weak in stressed large and small animals, and absent in fully impaired large or small animals. A disadvantage of this strength scoring approach is that both animal vitality and animal size can control the strength of reflex action. We are interested in an index for vitality, not confounded by animal size, so using strength of reflex action is not going to be appropriate.

To factor out the effects of animal size, we are left with scoring a reflex action as present or absent.  This may initially be confusing, with the question remaining, is the reflex present or not? I use the "rule of doubt" which says that the reflex is present if it is strong and clearly evident. It is scored absent if there is a question about its presence, whether it is weak or not clearly evident.

Scoring an individual reflex present or absent only gives us a qualitative measure and we are looking for a quantitative measure of vitality. We then move from the perspective of scoring individual reflex actions to a whole animal perspective, which includes many reflex actions, arising from combinations of various physiological, neural, organ, and muscle systems. If we measure the presence or absence of several reflex actions, representing combinations of various metabolic systems in an animal, then we can combine these scores into an integrated measure of reflex impairment that varies continuously and reflects the integrated nature of metabolic systems included in an animal. The combined scores for reflex impairment are then used to construct a RAMP curve which models the effects of stressors on animals through a range of stress and reflex impairment, as related to potential mortality.

An advantage of using RAMP is that the animal tells its story of stress-related impairment using systems that naturally integrate function as a whole animal. The animal communicates its vitality state directly through the language of reflex actions in response to appropriate stimuli, without the confounding effects of size and motivation.