By Boyle, Laura and Hanlon, Alison and O’Driscoll, Keelin, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 2008
Research Paper Web Link / URL:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159107001657
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159107001657
Description
The duration and frequency of lying behaviour and the time spent standing are behavioural indicators of cow comfort. The objective of this study was to validate a robustly designed datalogger (DL) for recording standing and lying behaviour of cows at pasture. The datalogger consists of an internal electric circuit, which records voltage (V) at a set interval. The circuit is inactivated (0 V) when an animal stands and reactivated (2.5 V) when the animal lies. Thirteen DL and 39 cows were used over 3 days. Dataloggers were attached to cows’ right hind leg during morning milking. Each DL was programmed to have a logging interval of 5 min. Human observers simultaneously recorded animal posture. Data from DL was adjusted by converting lying bouts of less than 10 min duration to standing behaviour. Results from direct observations were then compared with raw and adjusted data from DL using Cohen's Kappa and Spearman correlations, and an index of concordance for standing, lying and both sets of behaviour was calculated. Kappa and correlation results were higher after adjusting DL data than before (P < 0.001), suggesting that adjusting data in this fashion improves agreement between direct observation and DL data. The high correlation coefficients between data collected by human observers and data collected by the dataloggers, in addition to high κ-values indicate that the dataloggers are an excellent alternative to direct behavioural observations of standing and lying behaviours of dairy cows at pasture.
The duration and frequency of lying behaviour and the time spent standing are behavioural indicators of cow comfort. The objective of this study was to validate a robustly designed datalogger (DL) for recording standing and lying behaviour of cows at pasture. The datalogger consists of an internal electric circuit, which records voltage (V) at a set interval. The circuit is inactivated (0 V) when an animal stands and reactivated (2.5 V) when the animal lies. Thirteen DL and 39 cows were used over 3 days. Dataloggers were attached to cows’ right hind leg during morning milking. Each DL was programmed to have a logging interval of 5 min. Human observers simultaneously recorded animal posture. Data from DL was adjusted by converting lying bouts of less than 10 min duration to standing behaviour. Results from direct observations were then compared with raw and adjusted data from DL using Cohen's Kappa and Spearman correlations, and an index of concordance for standing, lying and both sets of behaviour was calculated. Kappa and correlation results were higher after adjusting DL data than before (P < 0.001), suggesting that adjusting data in this fashion improves agreement between direct observation and DL data. The high correlation coefficients between data collected by human observers and data collected by the dataloggers, in addition to high κ-values indicate that the dataloggers are an excellent alternative to direct behavioural observations of standing and lying behaviours of dairy cows at pasture.
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