Responses to climatic variables of horses housed outdoors under Nordic winter conditions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the responses to cold winter weather of Icelandic horses kept permanently outdoors. The horses were kept in a 0.8-ha enclosure, with free access to grass silage and a shelter. Behaviours were recorded during 23 d using direct observation scan sampling at 20-min intervals between 1600 and 0000, embracing air temperatures down to -31°C. Body condition score, coat length and serum thyroid hormone (T 4 ) level were recorded. Horses spent most of their time outdoors under all weather conditions, and the average incidence of being outdoors was 70%. The horses made more use of the shelter at low ambient temperatures (P < 0.01). There was also a strong tendency for increased use of the shelter in response to rain and wind (P < 0.07). Precipitation as snow had no effect. Shivering was observed once in a single horse, on a rainy day at +5°C. Average maximum neck coat length was 4.6 ± 0.9 cm. Body condition score remained within satisfactory limits during winter. Serum T 4 showed no correlation with ambient temperature (P = 0.70). It is concluded that a cold climate with temperatures down to -31°C does not challenge the thermoregulation of cold-acclimated Icelandic horses, provided that there is sufficient quality feed and access to a shelter. Key words: Horse, winter climate, shelter, behaviour, welfare, thyroid hormone
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".