Behavioural responses to climatic demands of dairy heifers housed outdoors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of the present study was to investigate the behavioural responses to different climatic demands of growing dairy heifers, during winter at a latitude of 60°N. Two groups (n= 11,12) of yearling dairy heifers were housed in two similar 3-ha enclosures, characterised by deciduous forest, ley and pasture. Each enclosure also contained a lying area, a heated water source and a feed bunk from which the heifers had free access to grass silage. The behaviour and location of each heifer were recorded by instant interval observations every 5 min between 0600 h and 2000 h during 23 observation days spread over the entire winter period. Outdoor temperature, wind speed and solar radiation were measured continuously. The climatic energy demand (CED, W m–2) was measured with a heated animal model. The climate had significant effects on all the main activities and on the location of the heifers. Higher CED values corresponded to a greater number of observations of heifers in the lying area, and a greater incidence of lying and of ruminating, but to a decreased incidence of eating and grazing. Increased migration to the forested areas instead of to open areas reflected increasing CED values. The results from the present study show that dairy heifers adapt their behavioural activity and choice of location to the climatic conditions, to reduce energy expenditure. Thus, dairy heifers can be sustained in a cold climate if they are provided with wind breaks and dry lying places. Key words: Bos taurus, dairy cattle, behaviour, winter climate
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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".