Behaviour, illness and management during the periparturient period in dairy cows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The periparturient period, typically defined as the period immediately before and after calving, is a challenging time for dairy cattle that must cope with physiological, metabolic and endocrine changes, as well as a variety of environmental and management-related stressors. These challenges likely contribute to the high incidence of disease observed during the weeks following parturition. Changes in behaviour during the period around parturition can be used to identify animals that are ill or at risk of disease. The aim of this review is to summarise current knowledge on the behavioural changes of dairy cattle during the periparturient period and how these changes relate to illness. We provide an overview of the concept of sickness behaviour and describe the normal changes in feeding behaviour, social behaviour, and resting behaviour around parturition and how these behaviours differ between animals that become ill after parturition and those that remain healthy. We also review the literature on behavioural responses to common farm management practices around parturition drawing on examples related to early cow–calf separation, space restriction, social re-grouping, and housing conditions. This review focuses primarily on indoor group-housed dairy cattle as the majority of research has been focussed in this area; however, literature related to pasture-based dairy production, other farm animal species, and rodents is also discussed. Reduced feeding time and intake, increased standing time, restlessness, and a reluctance or inability to successfully compete for access to important resources are examples of the behavioural changes that have been associated with illness after calving. Using behaviour to identify sick cattle and those at increased risk of becoming ill will facilitate prompt treatment and provide opportunities to identify management changes that prevent disease, improving overall herd health and animal welfare.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".