Pain and pessimism affect calves' play behaviours post-disbudding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Calves are expected to play less when in pain, and more pessimistic individuals may be more affected by painful events, such as hot-iron disbudding (i.e., horn-bud removal). We explored 1) the impact of disbudding on different play behaviours, predicting that those involving the head (e.g., play-fighting) may be more sensitive to disbudding due to the injury location, and 2) the effect of 'pessimism' (assessed using the judgement bias test) on changes in play post-disbudding. Holstein female calves (n = 19) were housed in groups of 10, individually tested for judgement bias at 25 days old, and disbudded following the farm's standards (including sedation and local anaesthesia) at 45 days old. Individual and parallel locomotor play and play-fighting were recorded for 4 h/day (from 1800 to 2200 h) for 5 days before disbudding, on disbudding day, and for 7 days after. Play-fighting reduced after disbudding compared to baseline and did not recover over 7 days. Locomotor play did not change on disbudding day and increased on the day after compared to baseline. More pessimistic calves did not show greater changes in play post-disbudding, but they showed a smaller increase in locomotor play on the day after disbudding, suggesting they did not recover as well as the others. Overall, play-fighting (i.e., pushing with the head) may be a more sensitive indicator of disbudding pain than other play behaviours, likely reflecting calves avoiding evoked pain, which may persist for at least 7 days. Our results also add to the growing literature demonstrating that pessimistic expectations affect animals' ability to cope with stressors. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s44338-025-00105-7.
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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".