Do windbreaks minimize stress on cattle grazing foothill winter range?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cattle often graze foothill rangelands in northern latitudes as a cost-effective alternative to being fed hay. In a 2-yr study, we determined whether exposure to winter wind elicits a stress response in pregnant cows (5–7 yr old) grazing a foothill rangeland. We measured several indicators of stress-response of cows which had (windbreak) or did not have (non-windbreak) access to windbreaks. In Winter 1 (1966–1997), backfat thickness increased on windbreak and non-wind-break cattle. Body condition scores of both groups were lower at the end of the trial. In Winter 2 (1997–1998), backfat thickness decreased for windbreak and non-windbreak cattle. Body condition scores did not change. Weight changes were minor both winters. Changes in backfat thickness indicated that cattle in Winter 1 were catabolizing more lean muscle tissue, whereas cattle in Winter 2 were catabolizing more fat. Cattle entered Winter 1 in lower body condition and mass than in Winter 2. Cattle with access to windbreaks tended to have a stronger cell-mediated immune response than non-windbreak cattle. Birth and weaning weights of calves, and calving interval were similar for windbreak and non-windbreak cattle. Neither winter elicited a strong stress response from cattle grazing this foothill rangeland, with or without access to windbreaks. Key words: Beef cattle, backfat, body condition, weight loss, immune response
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".