520 Male dairy calf transportation welfare and market value in British Columbia.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Male dairy calves are typically sold and transported to grower operations at a young age when they are vulnerable to health and welfare problems. We assessed male dairy calf health and immune status at the farm of origin before transportation and determined how health measures correlated to calf price. From October 2017 to March 2018, calves (n=646) from 18 dairy farms in British Columbia were assessed within 24 hours before shipping. Data included birth date, heart girth, as well as evidence of diarrhea, pneumonia, and navel disease. Serum total protein was estimated by optical refractometry within 7 days of age taking a cut-off value of < 5.2 g/dL as an indicator of failure of transfer of passive immunity. Price was recorded for 1688 calves sold at one BC auction market including the 126 calves of known health status. Descriptive statistics were calculated for each health measure and a general linear model was used to assess how health measures influenced calf price. Calves were sold at 6.7 ± 0.4 d (mean ± SE, range of 3 to 41 days). Calf health varied greatly between farms, with 17% of calves (0–43%) showing diarrhea, 2% (0–20%) with clinical signs of pneumonia, and 9% (0–19%) with navel disease. Failure of transfer of passive immunity was detected in 13% calves, ranging from 0 to 26%. Mean calf price was $127 ± 2 (mean ± SE) but 11% of calves sold for ≤ $10 and 3% were deemed unsaleable. The price at auction was positively correlated with calf heart girth (R2=0.56, P < 0.001), but not well correlated with other health measures. In summary, calf health and immune status were highly variable before transportation; improvements could increase the market value of calves and enhance their welfare as they transition from the dairy to calf growing operations.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".