Pain mitigation after band castration of beef calves and its effects on performance, behavior, Escherichia coli, and salivary cortisol1
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eighty-nine steer and bull calves (210 +/- 20 d of age) were randomly assigned to a 2 x 2 factorial arrangement of treatments to study the effect of sham or band castration (CAST) with or without pain medication (MED) on performance, behavior, cortisol, and Escherichia coli shedding. Steers (serving as controls; C) were previously castrated at 34 +/- 10 d of age, whereas bulls (B) remained intact until band application on d 20 of the experiment. One-half of the calves in each group received pain medication (M; xylazine epidural and intravenous flunixin meglumine) or saline (NM) solutions at 0.5 h before castration. Feed intake, ADG, and feeding behavior were measured over a 3-wk period before (used as covariates) and a 6-wk period after castration. Fecal and saliva samples were collected from 32 calves for E. coli enumeration at -7 (covariate), 2, 5, and 7 d, and for cortisol concentration at -0.5 (covariate), 0, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 24, 48, 168, and 336 h relative to castration, respectively. Lying behavior was measured in the home pen and step length at exit from the chute. There were no significant CAST x MED interactions on growth rate or feed intake. Overall ADG was less in B compared with C (P < 0.001), but feed intake was less during wk 4 only (P = 0.01). On average, M had less intake (P = 0.02) and eating rate (P = 0.04) than NM calves. The BM had less fecal E. coli counts than CM (P = 0.05) and castrated and nonmedicated calves (P = 0.08). Salivary cortisol was less in BM compared with the rest of treatments at 1 and 2 h after banding (P <or= 0.05). Castration reduced time spent lying (P = 0.06) and step length (P = 0.01) until d 28 after banding, whereas M reduced lying and step length on day of banding only (P <or= 0.06). Significant CAST x MED interactions were observed for frequency of visits to feeders and meal size, length, and frequency (P < 0.05) independent of the time after castration. This was due to greater values in the noncastrated and non-pain-medicated group compared with the rest, except for reduced meal frequency, indicating that pain medication and castration both affected feeding behavior. The medication protocol used in the present study eliminated the acute cortisol surge, which may be linked to reduced fecal E. coli counts observed during wk 1 after banding. However, feed intake, growth, and behavior suggested that pain was greatest during wk 3 and 4 after band application, which highlights the need for chronic pain mitigation strategies.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it