The effect of milk allowance on behavior and weight gains in dairy calves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this study was to investigate how milk allowance affects body weight gains and behavior before, during, and after weaning in dairy calves. Fifty-six Holstein calves were randomly assigned at 1wk of age to 1 of 4 feeding treatments of whole pasteurized milk: 6, 8, 10, or 12 L/d. Milk allowance was reduced by 50% at d 42, and then reduced by 20% per day starting at d 50, so that calves were completely weaned at d 55. Calves were provided ad libitum access to calf starter and hay. Body weight was measured weekly from 2 to 10wk of age. Milk intake increased with milk allowance as intended, although actual intakes were lower than the treatment allowance (e.g., averaging 5.66±0.19 L on the 6-L treatment and 9.41±0.21 L on the 12-L treatment before weaning). Intake of calf starter was higher for calves that were fed less milk before weaning (averaging 0.25±0.03kg/d and 0.05±0.03kg/d on the 6-L and 12-L treatments, respectively) and also during the weaning period (averaging 1.15±0.13kg/d and 0.54±0.14kg/d on these same treatments), but we observed no effect after weaning. Time spent at the hay feeder did not differ with treatment. Average daily gain was higher for calves that were fed more milk, increasing from 0.77±0.04kg/d with the 6-L treatment to 0.90±0.03kg/d with the 12-L treatment. Before weaning, calves fed less milk engaged in more unrewarded visits to the milk feeder, averaging 11.1±0.73 visits/d with the 6-L treatment and 0.4±0.78 visits/d with the 12-L treatment. During weaning, calves fed less milk still had more unrewarded visits to the milk feeder than calves fed more milk (19.7±1.64 visits/d with the 6-L treatment versus 10.1±1.74 visits/d with the 12-L treatment), but treatments did not differ after weaning. We conclude that higher milk allowances result in weight gain advantages before weaning that can persist beyond weaning, and that the high number of unrewarded visits to the milk feeder by calves that were fed less milk are indicative of persistent hunger.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".