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Cow behavior predicts and monitors calving diseases along the transition period
Bar, D., Factor, G., Friedman, E...
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Objectives
Calving diseases are a major problem in most dairy herds, negatively influencing cow welfare and dairy economics. Rumination behavior proved to be a good predictor of some calving diseases. New generation of these monitoring technologies are now able to describe the behavior of cows in a more detailed way (adding e.g. eating, resting, activity, etc.) The objective of this study was to characterize behavior of cows along the transition period by their health status, to improve the ability to characterize normal behavior of healthy cows and deviations from this behavior.
Material & Methods
We analyzed the behavior of a total of 1,553 cows calving in 8 farms in Israel, between February 2019 and November 2019. Farms were from various geographical locations, but similar in their feeding management (Total Mixed Ration [TMR]) and cow sheds (open, covered, dry compost barns). Calving events (i.e. twins, stillbirths, milk fever, retained placenta, metritis or endometritis, ketosis, and left displaced abomasum [LDA]) were recorded by the farmers and in addition, all cows were checked by a trained veterinarian between 6 to 12 days after calving. These data were stored in the Israeli cattle breeder association herd management software. The behavior of cows (the major activity in each minute) was obtained from a monitoring system (Sensehub Dairy, Allflex livestock intelligence) and summed to a total minutes per day. After initial descriptive statistics which is beyond the scope of this abstract, we present here the average effect of each major calving event in the last 10 days before calving and in the first 10 days of the lactation. Total minutes ruminating, eating, resting, or expressing high activity per day were dependent variables in mixed effect models (using the lme4 package in the R Foundation for Statistical Computing software) containing the day relative to calving day, calving event or diseases as fixed effects and cow nested in farm and parity as random effects.
Results
Last 10 days before calving: Cows with milk fever or retained placenta had a significant reduction (P<0.01) in the time spent ruminating days before the events happened. A significant reduction (P<0.01) in eating time and high activity time was observed in cows suffering later from stillbirth or ketosis, these cows had also a significant increase (P<0.01) in resting time in the last 10 days before calving.
First 10 days after calving: Cows with retained placenta, metritis or endometritis, ketosis, or with left displaced abomasum had a significant (P<0.001) decrease in rumination, eating, and high activity time. These cows had also a significant (P<0.001), substantial (~25%) increase in the time spent resting in the first 10 days after calving.
Conclusion
The finding of this study demonstrates the ability to identify cows developing one of the calving diseases early, thus possibly reducing their negative impact on cow welfare and farm profitability. Early identification of such cows before clinical signs are visible also faces the bovine practitioner with the challenge of how to best handle such cows. In addition, analyzing herd cow’s behavior along the transition period, might provide insight into weak points and serve as an objective tool to monitor improvements.
Keywords: Dairy cattle, behavior, calving diseases, monitoring.
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