0110 Health status of dairy feeder calves arriving to a veal facility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are approximately 959,600 dairy cows producing 479,800 male dairy calves every year in Canada. Based on information gathered from the 2015 Canadian National Dairy Study, less than 7% of male calves are euthanized at birth, leaving a significant number of male calves to enter the red meat industry. In Ontario and Quebec, the majority of male dairy calves flow into the veal industry. In 2015, 213,659 veal cattle from approximately 551 producers were slaughtered in Ontario and Quebec. Currently, there is little information about the fitness of dairy feeder calves (traditionally referred to as veal calves) entering the veal industry in Canada. The objective of this descriptive study was to evaluate the health status of calves arriving at a large veal farm. Using a scoring program (Calf Health Scorer App) developed by McGuirk et al. (2014) and supplemental scoring adapted from Wilson et al. (2000), Holstein and crossbred calves (n = 1356; 1335 male and 14 female) of unknown age were evaluated immediately on arrival at the commercial milk-fed veal facility in Southwestern Ontario. The results from the period of November 2015 until March 2016 were tabulated and confidence intervals (CI) were calculated (Wald's test) using Stata 14 (StataCorp College Station, Texas). Enlarged navels with at least heat or pain or moisture were found in 25.6% (95% CI: 23.3–27.9%) of calves, diarrhea was present in 16.7% (95% CI: 14.7–18.7%), fever (defined as greater than 39.5°C or 103.1°F) was present in 15.1% (95% CI: 13.2–17.0%), lack of subcutaneous fat or emaciated appearance was present in 22.4% (95% CI: 20.1–24.6%), depression or dullness was present in 26.8% (95% CI: 24.6–29.3%), signs of clinical dehydration (defined as >5% dehydration based on skin tent, attitude, presence or absence of suckle reflex and eye recession) were present in 26.5% (95% CI: 24.2–28.9%), and respiratory disease (defined as a combination of abnormal nasal and ocular discharge, ear and head position, cough and temperature) was present in 9.2% (95% CI: 7.6–10.7%). Based on the results gathered thus far, a significant proportion of calves (42.7% [95% CI: 40.0–45.3%]) are entering the facility with at least one identifiable health abnormality. This represents a significant welfare concern and the causes of the abnormalities need to be further understood to motivate a change in the way dairy feeder calves are treated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".