Publications by authors named "Radka Sarova"
Most dairy calves are housed individually in early ontogeny but social housing has positive effects on calf welfare including an advantage of social buffering, i.e., when negative effects of stress are mitigated through social support of conspecific.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper is composed of 5 datasets describing primiparous milk production, reproduction, body weight, activity and whole life longevity and reproductional data in dairy cows that had been reared either with or without mother for the first four days after birth and either in single housing or housing in groups of four between 1 and 8 weeks of age. The datasets contain the following variables- survival to the first lactation, date of first successful insemination, milk parameters per day (such as sum of milk yield, milk electrical conductivity and milking time), activity and body weight, all these collected during the first standardized lactation of 305 days. Cows' longevity, reproduction and other management events were recorded during the whole life of experimental animals (such as inseminations, pregnancy diagnostics, group changes etc.
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- The study examined the time intervals between a sender's elimination of an olfactory signal and a receiver's response (sniffing and overmarking) in four species of African equids, focusing on factors like age and sex.
- Results indicated that the time between elimination and overmarking was shorter among female friends and parent-offspring pairs, supporting the social bond hypothesis, while intraspecific time variations did not correlate with species social organization, challenging the group cohesion hypothesis.
- The findings also showed that males were more drawn to sniffing eliminations than females, and that younger foals sniffed eliminations faster but spent more time sniffing in larger groups, suggesting the motivations behind olfactory exploration might differ from those for
Individual housing of dairy calves prevails in Europe and North America despite its negative effects on calf development. One of the main reasons is that farmers find individual housing of calves more practical than group housing. A compromise between practice and welfare could be housing calves in pairs.
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- Overmarking behavior in juvenile mammals, particularly foals of four African equid species, remains largely unexamined.
- The study found that foals exhibited varying rates of overmarking based on their species' social structures, with a greater tendency to overmark maternal eliminations at a young age.
- Interspecific differences were linked to social organization, showing higher overmarking in species with more aggressive social dynamics, while phylogenetic influences also played a role in their behavior.
Article Synopsis
- Overmarking is a common behavior in mammals where one individual overlaps another's scent mark, but its functions are not well understood, especially in juveniles.
- A study of 43 foals across various African equid species revealed that overmarking occurs frequently, with male foals doing it more than females, indicating potential social and sexual implications.
- Results suggest that overmarking helps foals share their identity with their mothers and may also represent an early display of male sexual behavior.