In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the issue of farm animal welfare. This interest stems from a belief that many modern livestock production systems do not allow animals to perform a natural range of behaviour, leading to a possible decline in welfare. One method of determining the value of natural behaviours is to perform preference tests. In dairy cows, choices relating to various treatments, including feeding, shouting, electric shock, hitting (Pajor et al., 2003) and being milked (Prescott et al., 1998) have been assessed using Y-maze methodology. This is a process that involves training animals to anticipate receiving a treatment if they enter one arm of the Y and an alternative treatment if they enter the other. We used preference tests as a tool to determine how dairy cows perceive aspects of their feeding environment, with specific emphasis on understanding what difficulties low ranking animals face at the feed-face. We hypothesised that subordinate cows would trade-off proximity to a dominant individual at the feed-face with access to food of a high quality.