Making tiestalls more comfortable: III. Providing additional lateral space to improve the resting capacity and comfort of dairy cows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dairy cows housed in tiestalls are restricted to one space; therefore, this space should be designed to accommodate all the activities cows need to perform. Lying is a very important behavior for dairy cows as well as a critical measure in the assessment of stall designs, to ensure that the cows' needs for resting space are met. The objective of this study was to determine if increasing tiestall width alters the lying behavior of lactating dairy cows. Two treatments were compared: the current recommendation (139 cm) and a double stall (284 cm). Sixteen cows were blocked by parity and lactation stage, then randomly allocated to a treatment and a stall within 1 of 2 rows in the research barn, for 6 wk. The average stall length was 188 cm. Leg-mounted accelerometers were used to record lying behaviors. Cows were video-recorded 24 h/wk using surveillance cameras positioned above the stalls. Video data from wk 1, 3, and 6 were extracted at a rate of 1 image/min and analyzed by a trained observer to assess the position and the location of the cow's body, head, and limbs during the lying hours. Lying behaviors and frequency of each position and location were analyzed in SAS (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC) using a mixed model in which treatment, block, and week were included as fixed factors, and cow and row as random factors. Multiple comparisons were adjusted using the Scheffé method. Results indicate that cows in double stalls fully extended their hindlimbs more often than single stall cows (21.7 vs. 7.6% of lying time). Cows in double stalls also intruded in the neighboring stalls with their hindlimbs less often (1.3 vs. 14.7% of lying time), instead positioning them inside their own stall more often (92.7 vs. 84.6% of lying time). Use of the second stall in the double stall group totaled 11.6, 5.1, 33.8, and 18.0% of lying time, respectively, for the head, front legs, hind legs, and body. Total lying time was not statistically different between double (716 min/d) and single stall (671 min/d) groups. Contacts with stall hardware during lying-down movements were also less frequent in double stalls (43.1 vs. 77.1% of lying events) compared with single stalls. These results suggest that dairy cows housed in double stalls modified their resting habits and used the extra space made available to them. Increasing stall width beyond the current recommendation is likely to benefit the cows by improving their ability to rest.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".