One Year Study of Lying and Standing Behaviour of Dairy Cows in a Frestall Barn in Italy

Abstract

Dairy farm buildings can have, as it is well known, a big influence on the microclimatic conditions in the cowshed. In order to examine the influence of environmental parameters on the conditions affecting animal welfare, an experimental programme was set up at a farm where anomalous behaviour of cows had been previously noted. The research was carried out in a freestall barn from June 2004 till June 2005. Part of the research involved a detailed monitoring of animal movements and a simultaneous measurement of temperature and humidity within the cowshed. The behaviour of cows has been obtained by the analysis of a recorded video and expressed through indices. A strict relationship between environmental parameters and animal movement has been confirmed by the results obtained. The proportion of animals resting in stalls during the daytime, not affected by milking or feeding, rised from 30% in hot periods to 75% in winter time. The highly significant (P<0.01) correlation obtained between environmental parameters and cow behaviour confirmed the strong influence of THI on total proportion of lying cows. However, the variation in cow behaviour when temperature values were inside the range considered optimal for cows, suggests the influence of other parameters, like direct radiation

Influence of automatic feeding systems on design and management of dairy farms

“…The resting phase in cubicles was prevalent during the night, when CRI was between 75.0 and 95.0% for more than 6 h, thus within a range of values considered desirable for cows welfare (Provolo and Riva, 2009). Activity in the feeding alley was mainly recorded during daytime, with a peak of 78.8% recorded after the feed distribution at 01:00-02:00 p.m.…”

Image monitoring on the behavior study of three genetic groups of confined goats

“…Such behavior can be analyzed repeatedly when it is necessary to capture images of more relevant conducts (Silva et al, 2006;Barbosa Filho et al, 2007;Cordeiro et al, 2011;Souza et al, 2011). The automatic analysis of digital images from video recordings represents an effective alternative to traditional techniques used in behavior studies (Provolo and Riva, 2009). Moreover, one of the advantages of automated monitoring systems is that they can collect data continuously, not disturbing the animals, and are subject to neither (inter)-observer reliability nor other sources of observer bias (Frost et al, 1997).…”

On the influence of the alternation of two different cooling systems on dairy cow daily activities

“…The execution of the computer-vision based system allowed the detection of dairy cow behaviours with a high level of accuracy as proved by the good values of the sensitivity indices (i.e., approximately 92% for the lying behaviour and 86% for feeding and standing ones) which yielded the percentage of cow behaviours correctly classified over the total number of cow bred in the area of the barn under study (Porto et al, 2013(Porto et al, , 2015. Three different behaviours were analysed among those most frequently studied (Overton et al, 2002;DeVries et al, 2003aDeVries et al, , 2003bFregonesi et al, 2007;Provolo and Riva, 2009;Bava et al, 2012) because they are highly related to the comfort of dairy cows: i) feeding, which refers to the standing still position of the cows in the feeding alley with the head through the rack; ii) standing, which refers to the standing still position of the cows in the alley or inside the cubicle or to the deambulation; iii) lying, which refers to all the possible decubitus position of the cows inside the cubicle. The four usual lying positions are the following: long position when the cow lies with the head outstretched forward; short position when the cow lies with the head tilted along one side of the body; narrow position when the cow lies on the sternum with the neck slightly bent, the lower limbs close to the body and the upper limbs that may be outstretched; large position when the cow lies on one side with the lower limbs relaxed.…”

“…The following behavioural indices (Overton et al, 2002;Provolo and Riva, 2009;Mattachini et al, 2011;Bava et al, 2012) were automatically computed by the computer-vision based system (Porto et al, 2013(Porto et al, , 2015: The behavioural indices were then related to the thermal stress index, named temperature humidity index (THI), which is the most frequently used in literature to assess the level of the thermal stress of dairy cows (Oliveira and Esmay, 1982;Cook et al, 2007). In this work, the THI index was calculated by the following relation (Yousef, 1985):…”

“…The correlations between behavioural indices and thermal stress indices were evaluated by calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient (r) (Provolo and Riva, 2009;Matachini et al, 2011). Correlation analyses were carried out by considering the values of behavioural and thermal stress indices computed during a week characterised by the hottest summer climatic conditions, which required the activation of the cooling systems.…”