A Pilot Study Using Accelerometers to Characterise the Licking Behaviour of Penned Cattle at a Mineral Block Supplement.

Identifying the licking behaviour in beef cattle may provide a means to measure time spent licking for estimating individual block supplement intake. This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of tri-axial accelerometers deployed in a neck-collar and an ear-tag, to characterise the licking behaviour of beef cattle in individual pens. Four, 2-year-old Angus steers weighing 368 ± 9.

The effects of dietary nitrate on plasma glucose and insulin sensitivity in sheep.

Nitrate (NO ) is an effective non-protein nitrogen source for gut microbes and reduces enteric methane (CH ) production in ruminants. Nitrate is reduced to ammonia by rumen bacteria with nitrite (NO ) produced as an intermediate. The absorption of NO can cause methaemoglobinaemia in ruminants.

Genetic variation in residual feed intake is associated with body composition, behavior, rumen, heat production, hematology, and immune competence traits in Angus cattle1.

This experiment was to evaluate a suite of biological traits likely to be associated with genetic variation in residual feed intake (RFI) in Angus cattle. Twenty nine steers and 30 heifers bred to be divergent in postweaning RFI (RFIp) and that differed in midparent RFIp-EBV (RFIp-EBVmp) by more than 2 kg DMI/d were used in this study. A 1-unit (1 kg DM/d) decrease in RFIp-EBVmp was accompanied by a 0.

Predicting Lameness in Sheep Activity Using Tri-Axial Acceleration Signals.

Lameness is a clinical symptom associated with a number of sheep diseases around the world, having adverse effects on weight gain, fertility, and lamb birth weight, and increasing the risk of secondary diseases. Current methods to identify lame animals rely on labour intensive visual inspection. The aim of this current study was to determine the ability of a collar, leg, and ear attached tri-axial accelerometer to discriminate between sound and lame gait movement in sheep.

Leptin pharmacokinetics in male mice.

Pharmacokinetics of leptin in mammals has not been studied in detail and only one study has examined more than one time point in non-mutant mice and this was in a female mice. This is the first study to describe leptin distribution over a detailed time course in normal male mice. A physiologic dose (12 ng) of radiolabelled leptin was injected into adult male mice via the lateral tail vein and tissues were dissected out and measured for radioactivity over a time course of up to two hours.

Spectral analysis of feeding and lying behavior of cattle kept under different feedlot conditions.

This study used spectral analysis in 2 separate experiments to examine feeding and lying behavior of Bos taurus steers under 2 housing treatments: a feedlot yard stocked at 12.0 m2 per head with a dry, firm pen surface (NDF) and a "high density" (HDF) feedlot yard stocked at 6.0 m2 per head with a wet and muddy feedlot pen surface.