Swapping milk for electrolytes: investigating dairy calf activity and hunger after replacing a meal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Replacing a milk meal with electrolytes is often done to hydrate pre-weaned calves following transport or diarrhea; however, its impact on the hunger and the activity of calves is unknown. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate the effect of replacing a milk feeding with electrolytes on the motivation of dairy calves to drink milk at a subsequent meal, the calf starter intake, and their activity. Healthy pre-weaned dairy calves ( n = 100) were enrolled at 23 ± 1 days of age. This crossover study exposed all calves to two treatments over 2 weeks. Each calf received two milk (2.74 L) and two electrolyte (2.74 L of 252 mOSM/L solution) feedings in random order as their morning meal, with a washout period in between. To measure the motivation of calves to drink milk, calves who consumed at least 20% of their morning offered meal, whether milk or electrolytes, received either an unaltered milk replacer or a milk replacer with a bitter additive (0.35 g/L quinine hydrochloride dihydrate) as their evening meal. Over the 2-week study period, the calves were exposed to four daily combinations of treatment (electrolyte vs . milk as the morning meal) and test (bitter vs . regular milk as the evening meal) applications: electrolytes and bitter milk, electrolytes and regular milk, milk and bitter milk, and milk and regular milk. The treatment and test milk order was balanced by calf. The milk replacer, electrolyte, and calf starter quantities were weighed before and after feeding to determine the amount consumed by each calf. A random subset of calves ( n = 69) was outfitted with accelerometers to measure the steps, the activity index, the lying time, and the lying bouts. These activity measures were summarized hourly for the 8 h between feedings on each test day. Regardless of the morning treatment, calves consumed less bitter milk than regular milk in the evening feeding, but an increase in calf willingness to consume bitter milk after replacing a meal with electrolytes was not observed. However, electrolyte-fed calves consumed more grain than milk-fed calves after the morning meal, took fewer steps, had a lower activity index, and spent less time lying at 7 and 8 h following the morning feeding compared with the milk-fed calves. The greater grain intake and less lying time during the hours before the evening feeding of the calves fed electrolytes in the morning compared with those fed milk suggest that substituting a milk meal with an electrolyte meal may increase behaviors indicating hunger in pre-weaned calves.
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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".