Social housing influences the behavior and feed intake of dairy calves during weaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated the effect of social housing on the behavioral, intake, and physiological changes that occur at weaning for dairy calves fed milk ad libitum. These changes were evaluated during the weaning (d 40 to 48 of age) and postweaning (d 49 to 56 of age) stages. Twenty male Holstein calves were fed milk replacer ad libitum and weaned gradually by dilution over 9 d starting at d 40 of age. Calves were housed in pairs (10 calves) or individually (10 calves) from birth until the beginning of the postweaning phase, when all calves were paired. Feed and water intake were monitored daily. Feeding time was video-recorded, and blood β-hydroxybutyrate concentration was measured on alternate days beginning on d 40 and ending on d 56 of age. Electronic accelerometers continuously recorded standing and lying behavior for the 17-d study. Solid feed consumption increased by more than 5-fold over the weaning phase in all calves; during this phase pair-housed calves consumed more than twice (0.96 vs. 0.50 kg/d on d 48) that of the individually housed calves. Postweaning all calves rapidly increased their solid feed intake, and to a greater extent for previously individually housed calves, such that intake was similar between treatments by d 56. Free water intake was stable during weaning; however, a decrease (of 6.6 L) occurred in the constituent milk replacer water intake across this phase. As result, total water intake (free water + milk replacer water content) decreased (by 6.0 L) over the weaning phase between d 40 (14.9 L/d) and d 48 (8.9 L/d). On the first day postweaning (d 49), total water intake for all calves increased sharply (to 19.0 L/d) and then returned to a lower baseline (13.2 L/d) the next day (d 50), and slowly increased over the following week. During the weaning phase, feeding time and feeding rate increased with time for all calves, whereas pair-housed calves had greater feeding rates than individually housed calves (13.4 vs. 6.6 g of DM/min). After weaning, calves previously housed individually spent more time feeding in the early hours of the day than calves housed in pairs. Lying time and lying bout frequency decreased with calf age during the weaning period across treatments, and pair-housed calves tended to spend less time lying than individually housed calves (1,015 vs. 1,039 min/d) during this time period. Blood β-hydroxybutyrate increased across treatments over the weaning period, with the largest increase occurring between d 48 (0.05 mmol/L) and d 50 (0.2 mmol/L). These results show that calves alter their behavioral patterns during weaning and that housing calves in pairs may ease the transition from milk to solid feed.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".