Ketonemia in dairy goats: Effect of dry period length and effect on lying behavior

One of the most important design criteria for dairy cow housing is access to a comfortable lying area. Behaviors such as the time cows spend lying down and how often they lie down can be used to evaluate the quality of stalls; however, assessing lying behavior on farms can be challenging. Indices such as the cow comfort index (CCI) and stall use index (SUI) have been widely used in on-farm assessments. The aims were to establish reliable sampling and recording methods for measuring lying behavior, to evaluate the adequacy of the CCI and SUI as estimates of lying behavior, and to describe variation in the lying behaviors of free-stall-housed dairy cows. The time spent lying down and the number of lying bouts for 2,033 cows on 43 farms were recorded for 5 d using electronic data loggers sampling at 1-min intervals. The CCI and SUI were calculated based on a single observation taken 2 h before the afternoon milking on each farm. Subsets of data were created, including 4, 3, 2, or 1 d per cow and 40, 30, 20, 10, 5, or 1 cow(s) per farm. The estimates derived from each sample size were compared with the overall means (based on 5 d and 44 cows per farm) for lying time and number of lying bouts, and the CCI and SUI were compared with the farm means of lying time, number of lying bouts, and bout duration using linear regression. Recording 30 or more cows for 3 d or more represented the overall means with high accuracy (R(2) > 0.9), but using fewer cows or fewer days per cow resulted in poorer estimates of the farm mean. The CCI and SUI showed no association with the daily lying time (h/d; R(2) < 0.01), and CCI was only weakly associated with the number of lying bouts per day (R(2) = 0.16) and bout duration (min/bout; R(2) = 0.09). Cows lay down 11.0 +/- 2.1 h/d in 9 +/- 3 bouts/d, with a bout duration of 88 +/- 30 min/bout. These values ranged from 9.5 to 12.9 h/d, 7 to 10 bouts/d, and 65 to 112 min/bout across farm means, and 4.2 to 19.5 h/d, 1 to 28 bouts/d, and 22 to 342 min/bout across individuals, showing that variation in lying behavior among individual cows within farm was greater than differences among farms.

The aims of this study were to determine how measures of feeding, drinking, and standing behavior change over the period around calving, to derive objective meal and drinking bout criteria for transition cows, and to describe the within-cow consistency of these behavioral measures. Fifteen transition dairy cows were monitored from 10 d before until 10 d after calving. Meal criteria were calculated for each cow in both the pre- and postcalving periods and varied among cows from 5.3 to 105.2 min. There was a tendency for the average number of meals per day to be higher after calving than before calving, but time spent eating declined from 87 to 62 min/d from the precalving to the postcalving period. Time spent drinking before calving averaged 5.5 min/d and increased gradually after calving to an average of 6.8 min/d. Total daily standing times remained reasonably similar over the transition period but were highest at around calving (14.4 h) and lowest during the precalving period (12.3 h). On the day of calving, there was a dramatic increase in the number of standing bouts (21.8 bouts) compared with the pre- and postcalving averages of 11.7 and 13.1 bouts, respectively. In summary, changes in feeding behavior may help account for the well-documented changes in feed intake during transition. Documented changes in standing behavior suggest that cow comfort may be particularly important during the time around calving.

Lameness is widely recognized as one of the most serious welfare and production concerns in the dairy industry. Our objectives were to evaluate the associations between lying behavior and lameness, and to determine whether lying behavior can be used as a diagnostic tool for lameness. Electronic data loggers recorded lying behavior of 1,319 cows from 28 farms at 1-min intervals for 5 d. These cows were gait scored according to a 5-point Numerical Rating System (NRS), and categorized as NRS or=3) and SEVLAME (NRS=4). Data were divided into 2 groups: 11 farms using deep-bedded stalls (DB) and 17 farms using mattress stalls (MAT). Differences in the daily lying time (h/d), frequency of lying bouts (n/d), duration of lying bouts (min/bout), and the standard deviation of bout duration (min/bout) between LAME or SEVLAME cows and those that were not were tested using mixed models. Receiver operating characteristic curves were constructed to identify behavioral thresholds to distinguish SEVLAME cows from the rest. Odds ratios for SEVLAME were estimated using logistic regression. Overall, 28.5% of cows were LAME including 7.3% that were SEVLAME. The prevalence of SEVLAME was higher on MAT farms than on DB farms (9.3+/-1.3 vs. 4.4+/-1.2%, respectively). SEVLAME cows on DB farms spent 12.8 [confidence interval (CI): 12.0 to 13.7] h/d lying down compared with 11.2 (CI: 10.7 to 11.8) h/d for cows that were not SEVLAME. These cows had longer duration of lying bouts [95.3 (CI: 84.6 to 107.3) vs. 80.3 (CI: 74.9 to 86.1) min/bout] and greater SD of bout duration [44.4 (CI: 41.1 to 48.0) vs. 50.7 (CI: 44.1 to 58.3) min/bout]. There were no behavioral differences among lameness categories on MAT farms. Within DB farms, cows with lying times >14.5 h/d had 16.2 (5.8 to 45.2) times higher odds of being SEVLAME. Cows with average lying bouts >90 min/bout were at 3.0 (1.2 to 7.4) times higher odds of being SEVLAME, and cows with average SD of bout duration >55 min/bout were at 4.1 (1.7 to 9.9) times higher odds of being SEVLAME. These results show that high lying times, long lying bouts, and variability in the duration of lying bouts were associated with lameness, and that stall surface influenced the behavioral responses of lame cows. Copyright (c) 2010 American Dairy Science Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.