Effects of the early social environment on behavioral responses of dairy calves to novel events
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Providing young animals the opportunity to engage in more complex social interactions is hypothesized to improve their capacity to cope with changing environments. To test the effects of the early social environment on the behavioral responses of dairy calves to novelty we compared (1) individual with pair housing and (2) group housing with companions of similar age with group housing with a more experienced conspecific. Fifty-four dairy calves were separated from the cow soon after birth and housed individually (n=6 calves) or in pairs (n=6 pairs), or in pens composed of groups of 3 young calves (n=6 groups) or groups of 2 young calves and an older calf (n=6 groups). At 65 to 69 d of age, calf responses were tested in an environmental novelty test and a social novelty test. Individually housed calves were more active [i.e., spent less time standing (means ± SEM): 201.4 vs. 280.3±30.5 s/test; and more time running: 83.2 vs. 57.3±19.1 s/test] and more reactive (i.e., defecated more frequently; 1.3 vs. 0.6±0.2 events/test) when tested in the novel arena, compared with pair-housed calves. During the social novelty test, individually housed calves spent less time running (51.8 vs. 96.4±11.6 s/test), showed a longer latency to socially interact (111.1 vs. 20.4±21.7 s/test), and spent more time involved in social interactions (130.7 vs. 79.7±19.0 s/test) with the unfamiliar calf than did pair-housed calves. Individually housed calves were also more reactive to the presence of an unfamiliar calf as indicated by increased rates of defecation (2.3 vs. 0.7±0.5 events/test) and kicking (2.2 vs. 0.7±0.4 events/test) compared with pair-housed calves. Calves housed in groups with an older companion were more reactive to the novel environment than were calves housed in groups of similar age: they defecated (1.0 vs. 0.6±0.2 events/test) and vocalized (23.6 vs. 15.3±3.8 events/test) more during the test. These calves also spent less time exploring (266.3 vs. 355.0±27.4 events/test) and had a lower frequency of kicking (0.1 vs. 2.0±0.5 events/test) when tested with an unfamiliar calf. We conclude that calves housed individually are more reactive to environmental and social novelty when compared with calves housed in pairs and that calves housed with an older companion are less reactive to a novel calf when compared with calves housed in groups of similar age.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".