Understanding natural behavior to improve dairy goat (Capra hircus) management systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Public interest is stimulating farming industries to improve animal welfare in production systems. Indoor housing of ruminants has received scrutiny because of perceived intensiveness and lack of naturalness. Animal welfare has traditionally focused on health benefits (e.g., bedding management and reducing disease) and reducing negative experiences (e.g., painful husbandry practices). Recent attention to animals having “a life worth living” extends expectations to provide increased care and opportunities for positive experiences and natural behaviors. Although not all natural behaviors necessarily contribute to improved welfare, we present evidence for why many are important, and for how they can be promoted in commercial systems. Worldwide, commercial dairy goats (Capra hircus) are frequently housed in large open barns with space to move and soft bedding for lying; however, this is not sufficient to promote the range of natural behaviors of goats, which in turn suggests that commercial housing could be improved. The basis for this thinking is from the range of behaviors expressed by the Capra genus. Collectively, these species have evolved cognitive and behavioral strategies to cope with harsh and changing environments, as well as variable and limited vegetation. The rocky and often steep terrain that goats inhabit allows for predator avoidance and access to shelter, so it is not surprising that domesticated goats also seek out elevation and hiding spaces; indeed, their hoof structure is designed for the movement and grip in such rugged environments. The browsing techniques and flexibility in diet selection of wild, feral and extensively managed goats, appears to be equally important to housed goats, highlighting the need for more complexity in how and what goats are fed. Goats naturally live in small, dynamic groups, governed by complex social structures in which horns play a strong role. Commercial housing systems should consider the benefits of more natural-sized social groups and revisit the rationale behind horn removal. We suggest that cognitive stimulation is a potential welfare improvement for goats in commercial settings. Goat cognitive abilities, which enabled success in complex and variable social and physical environments, are unchallenged in uniform environments, potentially leading to negative affective states. We make suggestions for housing improvements that could be readily adopted into current systems without compromising production efficiency.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".