Influences of human contact following milk-feeding on nonnutritive oral behavior and rest of individual and pair-housed dairy calves during weaning

Abstract

Graphical Abstract Summary: This study evaluated the interactive effects of social housing and human contact following feeding, including scratching to mimic brushing, on nonnutritive oral behaviors and rest of dairy calves during weaning. Individually housed calves performed more pen-directed nonnutritive oral behavior than pair-housed calves, but provision of human contact reduced the duration of this behavior to a level that did not differ from pair-housed calves. Human contact following milk-feeding reduced the total duration of all nonnutritive oral behavior (pen-directed, bedding-directed, cross-sucking, and human-directed) and increased rest with no effect of housing treatment or interaction between housing treatment and human contact. These results suggest that human contact influenced performance of nonnutritive oral behavior following milk-feeding, particularly reducing pen-directed sucking in individually housed calves, highlighting the role of restrictive environments in the expression of these behaviors in conventionally housed dairy calves.

Personality of individually housed dairy-beef crossbred calves is related to performance and behavior

“…Special management, such as providing environmental stimulation, may be needed for these calves under individual housing conditions (da Silva et al, 2022). For instance, additions to the environment of individually housed calves can reduce the occurrence of non-nutritive oral behaviors, such as providing hay (Downey et al, 2022), stationary brushes (Horvath et al, 2020) or human contact (Doyle and Miller-Cushon, 2022). Activity patterns of calves in the home pen as a personality trait are rarely explored for links with other behaviors and performance, but the current study has revealed its potential importance and how this measure can be easily collected with technology.…”