Welfare implications of prolonged cow-calf contact in dairy farming
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In dairy farming it is standard practice to separate the calf from the cow shortly after birth, which has raised questions in society regarding animal welfare. Alternative rearing systems that allow for prolonged cow-calf contact are receiving increasing interest from various stakeholders. Yet, little is known about how different types of cow-calf contact (i.e. partial or full contact) may contribute to improving calf rearing conditions in a farm setting with respect to animal welfare. Partial contact allows only for limited cow-calf interactions, whereas full contact includes suckling. This thesis examined welfare implications of different types of cow-calf contact in comparison with a rearing system without prolonged cow-calf contact. Full contact enhanced cows’ motivation to reunite with their calf and increased the expression of maternal-filial behaviour, although it compromised calf health and caused distress in calves during debonding compared to the other rearing systems. Partial contact allowed for some expressions of species-specific behaviour and seemed to mitigate some drawbacks observed in the full contact system related to calf health and weaning distress. Overall, the findings in this thesis showed that trade-offs for animal welfare existed in both partial and full CCC systems. Strategies that could potentially mitigate the downsides of prolonged CCC systems relate to improved cow-calf housing, calf feeding and monitoring, and newborn management
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".