Training cattle to approach a feed source in response to auditory signals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To help improve cow traffic in automated milking systems, we examined whether heifers could be trained to approach a feeder in response to a tone emanating from their collars. Eighteen dairy heifers were used in four experiments. Ten heifers were trained by operant conditioning. Eight of these heifers approached the feeder more frequently and with a shorter mean latency following the tone than in the control periods (P < 0.05). Four of the heifers were tested in a new location but none of the heifers approached the feeder following the tone. A further eight heifers were trained by classical conditioning. When tethered close to the feeder during training, no animals learned to approach the feeder in response to the tone. When four heifers were trained while loose in the pen and had a second tone that predicted an aversive treatment, the animals approached the feeder more often after the positive tone (P < 0.05). Operant conditioning can be used to train heifers to approach a feeder in response to an auditory signal. Classical conditioning procedures are less effective and the optimal training procedures need to be defined before implementation in automated milking systems. Key words: Dairy cattle, learning, conditioning, auditory signals, automatic milking systems
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".