Pain in the hours following surgical and rubber ring castration in dairy calves: Evidence from conditioned place avoidance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Male cattle reared for beef are typically castrated. Male calves born on dairy farms are increasingly reared for beef, so a better understanding of how to humanely perform this procedure in dairy systems is now required. We studied the short-term affective responses of dairy calves to castration using a conditioned place aversion paradigm. Young Holstein bulls (16 d old, n = 30) were castrated by either rubber ring (n = 15) or surgery (n = 15), and then kept in a visually distinctive recovery pen for 6 h after the procedure. Calves acted as their own control and were sham castrated and allowed to recover for 6 h in another visually distinctive pen. During both castration and sham procedures, calves received a sedative (xylazine, 0.2 mg/kg), local anesthetic (lidocaine, 5 mL), and a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory (meloxicam, 0.5 mg/kg). After exposure to both treatments (castration and sham), calves were tested for place aversion by providing free access to the 2 pens where they experienced the different treatments. Calves were tested for aversion 48, 72, and 96 h after their last treatment. We recorded how much time they spent in each pen and where they chose to rest. We did not find differences in time spent resting or resting location, suggesting that calves did not form a more negative memory of castration in comparison to the sham procedure. The lack of treatment effects may be due to features of our testing paradigm, including effective multimodal pain control during the 6-h conditioning period and limiting testing to the first days after the procedure.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".