Short communication: Calf body temperature following chemical disbudding with sedation: Effects of milk allowance and supplemental heat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of caustic paste combined with a sedative is one of the least painful methods for disbudding. It is recommended to disbud at as early as 5d of age. However, the sedative xylazine reportedly causes a decrease in core temperature. Furthermore, young calves do not thermoregulate efficiently. We investigated the effects of disbudding calves at 5d of age using caustic paste and xylazine sedation on body temperature, activity, and milk intake of 46 individually housed 5-d-old calves in a 2×2 factorial design, with milk fed at 4.5L/d (low-fed calves) versus 9L/d (high-fed calves), with or without a heat lamp. Body temperature, calf activity (standing time), and barn temperature were monitored continuously using automatic data loggers on the day of, before the day of, and the day after disbudding. All calves were injected intramuscularly with 0.25mL of 2mg/mL xylazine 20min before disbudding (dose: 0.12±0.003mL/kg of BW). We found that the body temperature of 5-d-old calves decreased immediately after the injection of the sedative xylazine. The body temperature of calves decreased 0.9±0.09°C and it took 3.8±0.32h to climb back to the preinjection body temperature. Calves that were fed the lower amount of milk, received a higher dose of xylazine (mL/kg BW), or were disbudded in a colder environment were more affected by body temperature variations (lower and longest decrease in body temperature and higher magnitude). Calf activity recovery followed the pattern of body temperature recovery. Milk allowance and supplemental heat did not help enhance recovery during the 6h following the procedure. The disbudding procedure did not affect milk intake but calves with less body temperature decrease or kept in a warmer environment drank more milk following disbudding. Low-fed calves were overall more affected by the procedure than high-fed calves during the disbudding day and the following day (greater decrease in body temperature and drank less in the colder environment). Providing a high-milk diet is a suitable option to help mitigate calf discomfort due to the disbudding procedure, whereas using a heat lamp does not seem to help, at least in a mildly cold winter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".