Graduate Student Literature Review: Sociability, fearfulness, and coping style-Impacts on individual variation in the social behavior of dairy cattle.

Dairy cattle typically live in groups, but individuals within these groups vary in their social behavior. An improved understanding of factors affecting the expression of social behavior may help refine management practices on farms to better accommodate the needs of all individuals within the herd. In this paper, we review (1) some examples of how social behavior is expressed in cattle, (2) commonly assessed personality traits in this species (i.

Pain in the hours following surgical and rubber ring castration in dairy calves: Evidence from conditioned place avoidance.

Male cattle reared for beef are typically castrated. Male calves born on dairy farms are increasingly reared for beef, so a better understanding of how to humanely perform this procedure in dairy systems is now required. We studied the short-term affective responses of dairy calves to castration using a conditioned place aversion paradigm.

Pain in the weeks following surgical and rubber ring castration in dairy calves.

Many male dairy calves are castrated when reared for beef production, but for dairy breeds the assessment of the longer-lasting pain associated with this procedure has received little scientific attention. In this study we assessed 2 methods: surgical (n = 10 calves) and rubber ring (n = 11). All calves were castrated at 28 d of age using multimodal pain control.

Pessimistic dairy calves are more vulnerable to pain-induced anhedonia.

Pain induces deficits in appreciation of rewards (i.e. anhedonia) and variation in response to pain may be partly explained by individual differences in general expectations (i.

Individual Variability in Response to Social Stress in Dairy Heifers.

Regrouping is associated with increased aggression, and disruption of time-budgets. Individuals vary in how well they cope with social stress. Our objective was to describe individual differences in agonistic behavior in dairy heifers after regrouping, and determine how time-budget and behavioral synchronization were affected by these coping strategies.