Making tiestalls more comfortable: IV. Increasing stall bed length and decreasing manger wall height to heal injuries and increase lying time in dairy cows housed in deep-bedded tiestalls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Poor stall configuration can negatively affect cow welfare by impairing lying behavior and leading to injuries in dairy cows. The comfort of the stall bed in tiestalls is affected by the material components of the stall bed (stall base and bedding), but also by the amount of space provided. The amount of space cows are able to access lengthwise in a tiestall is determined by the stall bed length and the height of the manger wall (the front limit of the stall bed), which can limit access into the space available at the front of the stall. This project aimed to maximize cow comfort in deep-bedded tiestalls by investigating the combined effect of increased bed length and decreased manger wall height in a crossover experiment (2 periods with 1 wk habituation + 6 wk data collection). Two rows of 12 tiestalls were modified (n = 24 cows). Each row was a different length, short (178 cm; length commonly found in Quebec) or long (188 cm), and cows remained on the same row (same stall bed length) for the entire experiment. In each row, there were 6 stalls of each manger wall height treatment: high (20 cm, upper limit recommended) or low (5 cm). During period 2, cows switched manger wall height treatments. A 7.6-cm-deep straw bedding layer was added to all stalls by adding a bedding keeper to the ends of stalls. All initially injured locations healed over the 14-wk study, and 2 patterns of healing emerged. Improvement in hock injury (lateral tarsal and calcanei) was observed from wk 1 to 6 for all treatments. A plateau in injury severity score reduction was observed in period 2 for the hock (lateral, dorsal, and medial calcanei), anatomical knee, carpal joints (front knees), and proximal and medial neck, which was likely the result of the insensitivity of the injury scoring scheme rather than healing not occurring. Cows in long stalls were found to spend more time lying (14.1 vs. 13.3 h/d) and had longer lying bouts than cows in short stalls (74.1 vs. 52.9 min/bout). Manger wall height did not affect injury or lying time, but may affect how cows position themselves while lying. Higher lying times in our study were comparable to those reported in deep-bedded loose pens, indicating that cows with more bedding, especially those in long stalls, were more comfortable. Our results suggest that deep-bedded straw stalls with bedding keepers have the potential to be beneficial to cow comfort on tiestall farms.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".