Welfare of dairy cows.

This Scientific Opinion addresses a European Commission's mandate on the welfare of dairy cows as part of the Farm to Fork strategy. It includes three assessments carried out based on literature reviews and complemented by expert opinion. Assessment 1 describes the most prevalent housing systems for dairy cows in Europe: tie-stalls, cubicle housing, open-bedded systems and systems with access to an outdoor area.

Combining accelerometers and direct visual observations to detect sickness and pain in cows of different ages submitted to systemic inflammation.

Cattle suffering from inflammatory infection display sickness and pain-related behaviours. As these behaviours may be transient and last only a few hours, one may miss them. The aim of this study was to assess the benefit of combining continuous monitoring of cow behaviour via collar-attached accelerometers with direct visual observations to detect sickness and pain-related behavioural responses after a systemic inflammatory challenge (intravenous lipopolysaccharide injection) in cows of two different ages, proven by clinical, physiological and blood parameters.

Using Expert Elicitation to Abridge the Welfare Quality® Protocol for Monitoring the Most Adverse Dairy Cattle Welfare Impairments.

The Welfare Quality® consortium has developed and proposed standard protocols for monitoring farm animal welfare. The uptake of the dairy cattle protocol has been below expectation, however, and it has been criticized for the variable quality of the welfare measures and for a limited number of measures having a disproportionally large effect on the integrated welfare categorization. Aiming for a wide uptake by the milk industry, we revised and simplified the Welfare Quality® protocol into a user-friendly tool for cost- and time-efficient on-farm monitoring of dairy cattle welfare with a minimal number of key animal-based measures that are aggregated into a continuous (and thus discriminative) welfare index (WI).

Refinement of international recommendations for cubicles, based on the identification of associations between cubicle characteristics and dairy cow welfare measures.

Maladjusted cubicles for dairy cattle may cause increased skin alterations, lameness, and dirtiness. The International Commission of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering has produced several recommendations for cubicle design, but a previous study showed that not all of them seem efficient. Here, we aim to refine and complete these recommendations.

Detection of changes in the circadian rhythm of cattle in relation to disease, stress, and reproductive events.

Disease and stress can disrupt the circadian rhythm of activity in animals. Sensor technologies can automatically detect variations in daily activity, but it remains difficult to detect exactly when the circadian rhythm disruption starts. Here we report a mathematical Fourier-Based Approximation with Thresholding (FBAT) method designed to detect changes in the circadian activity rhythm of cows whatever the cause of change (typically disease, stress, oestrus).

Infectious Disease Does Not Impact the Lying and Grooming Behaviour of Post-Parturient Dairy Cows.

Behaviour is commonly used to detect sickness in animals, but the impact of sickness on lying and maternal behaviours around parturition is not well understood. The objective was to assess the effects of sickness on the lying and grooming behaviours of dairy cows in the first 24 h after giving birth. Cows were categorized as 'sick' (n = 8) if they had at least one rectal temperature ≥39.

Do International Commission of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (CIGR) dimension recommendations for loose housing of cows improve animal welfare?

Design of cubicles and self-locking barriers can affect cow skin alterations, lameness, and dirtiness. We investigated whether the International Commission of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (CIGR, Gainesville, FL)-recommended cattle housing design and dimensions actually improve cow welfare. We recorded individual cow body dimensions and assessed skin alterations, dirtiness, and lameness on 3,841 cows from 131 loose housing dairy farms (76 farms with cubicles and 55 straw-yard systems).

Behavioral and patho-physiological response as possible signs of pain in dairy cows during Escherichia coli mastitis: A pilot study.

Bovine mastitis is one of the most common diseases in the dairy industry and it is a major welfare problem. Pain during mastitis is generally assessed through behavior but a combination of indicators would increase the chances of detecting pain and assessing its intensity. The aim of this study was to assess behavioral and patho-physiological responses as possible signs of pain experienced by cows after experimental intramammary challenge (mastitis) with Escherichia coli.

A prospective exploration of farm, farmer, and animal characteristics in human-animal relationships: An epidemiological survey.

Human-animal relationships are essential for dairy farming. They affect work comfort and efficiency, as well as milk production. A poor human-animal relationship can result in stress and accidents to both animals and caretakers and needs to be improved.

Differential outcomes of unilateral interferences at birth.

Behavioural modifications, including modifications of emotional reactivity, can occur following early experience such as handling (manual rubbing). Here, we investigated the effects of unilateral tactile stimulation at an early stage on emotional reactions later on. We handled newborn foals intensively on one side of their body.

Adult-young ratio, a major factor regulating social behaviour of young: a horse study.

Background: Adults play an important role in regulating the social behaviour of young individuals. However, a few pioneer studies suggest that, more than the mere presence of adults, their proportions in social groups affect the social development of young. Here, we hypothesized that aggression rates and social cohesion were correlated to adult-young ratios.

Laterality and emotions: visual laterality in the domestic horse (Equus caballus) differs with objects' emotional value.

Lateralization of emotions has received great attention in the last decades, both in humans and animals, but little interest has been given to side bias in perceptual processing. Here, we investigated the influence of the emotional valence of stimuli on visual and olfactory explorations by horses, a large mammalian species with two large monocular visual fields and almost complete decussation of optic fibres. We confronted 38 Arab mares to three objects with either a positive, negative or neutral emotional valence (novel object).