Nonambulatory cows: Duration of recumbency and quality of nursing care affect outcome of flotation therapy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cows that are unable or unwilling to stand and remain recumbent for ≥ 12 h are defined as nonambulatory. Care and management of nonambulatory cattle is considered a major animal welfare concern facing the livestock industry, particularly the dairy sector. Flotation therapy has gained interest as a means to promote recovery in nonambulatory cows and is based on the concept that by floating the cow in warm water, secondary pressure damage to muscles and nerves will be reduced. The objective of this study was to assess the physiological responses to stress related to the flotation therapy and to evaluate the effect of recumbency duration and nursing care on the outcome of the flotation therapy. The outcomes of 34 nonambulatory Holstein dairy cows were analyzed after they were subjected to flotation therapy. The duration of recumbency and quality of nursing care provided before initiation of the flotation treatment were assessed based on producer responses to survey questions, and from on-site observations by the researchers. A veterinarian examined all cows before flotation therapy began. The treatment was divided into 5 phases: baseline (before filling), manipulation (placing the cow into the tank), filling (the tank was filled with water), flotation (the cow was confined in the filled tank), and draining (water was removed from the tank). Stress responses to the procedure, excluding the manipulation portion, were assessed using heart rate variability. The high-frequency component (HF normalized units) decreased during the filling and draining phases (2.8 ± 0.2 and 3.1 ± 0.4, respectively) compared with the baseline and floating phase (5.1 ± 0.6 and 4.9 ± 0.3, [corrected] respectively). These results indicate that the stress related to the flotation therapy is greatest during the filling and draining phases of the treatment, when cows likely have to exert increased effort to transition to a standing position. The flotation therapy was less likely to be successful on cows that had been recumbent for longer periods (odds ratio=0.96; 95% CI=0.93-0.99, for every 1-h increase in time recumbent before the therapy began). Higher quality of nursing care provided to nonambulatory cows increased the chance of recovery. In conclusion, cows subjected to flotation therapy were more likely to recover if they were treated at early stage of recumbency and if good nursing care was provided while recumbent.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".