Broiler Chicks’ Motivation for Different Wood Beddings and Amounts of Soiling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the wild, excreta soiled surroundings can attract predators and spread disease. Yet, farmers rear broiler chicks in large barns with stocking densities that prevent excreta segregation. To measure chicks' motivation to access unsoiled bedding or soiled litter (collectively, substrates) we used 40 16-day-old broiler chicks who were divided into six two-compartment pens. The 'home' compartment (H) contained soiled wood shavings, while the 'treatment' compartment (T) contained either aspen wood shavings, pine and spruce wood shavings, soiled pine and spruce wood shavings, ammonia reductant treated soiled pine and spruce wood shavings, or a feed treatment as a gold standard. The barrier separating the compartments had two one-way push-doors that chicks pushed to access a resource. The chicks' motivation was measured by the average maximum weight pushed to access each resource. The door leading to T weighed 0% (raised), 10%, 20%, or 30% of the chicks' body weight, and chicks could return to H via a raised (for 0%) or unweighted door. Our findings indicate that chicks worked hardest for feed, but paid a lower, equal price to access all substrates. With increasing door weight, chicks visited less and spent less time with the substrates. Therefore, as chicks themselves do not avoid litter that could have potential negative effects on their well-being, it is important that farmers diligently monitor litter conditions as their primary care-takers.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".