This study examined the suckling behaviour of triplet-rearing ewes for three days post-parturition. Twenty-six ewes were enrolled with 11 being observed for the entire 3-days post-lambing. The ...behaviour of the ewe, number of lambs present at the end of the event and the behaviour that terminated the event were recorded for each suckling event. The mean suckling event duration increased when additional lambs were present at the end of the suckling event. Ewes that had observations across all three days showed no change in the number of suckling events over time, but suckling events tended to be shorter on day 3 than on days 1 or 2. On day 1 more suckling events were terminated by the ewe walking away from her lambs than on days 2 and 3. The odds of a ewe walking away to terminate the suckling event were greater when three lambs were present compared with two. Ewes showed more inactive behaviours when more lambs were present at the end of the suckling event. The results partially supported the hypothesis that the ewe would be more likely to terminate a suckling event when three lambs were attempting to suck compared with one or two lambs.
Observations of 17 heifer-calf pairs were collected over the first 5 days postpartum (p.p.) to study nursing and maternal behaviour of beef cattle. Cattle were managed in a 6 ha paddock and ...heifer–calf interactions were determined from both regular visual observations and video recordings. Of 17 potential calves, one was stillborn and 3 died in the first 5 days p.p. associated with dystocia and congenital malformation. Four further potential neonatal calf mortality risks were identified, which included poor calving site selection (n = 1), calf misadventure (n = 1), heifer-calf separation (n = 3) and mismothering (n = 3), with each resulting in distress, physical exhaustion of the calf and impaired nursing. There was marked variation between heifers in the expression of optimal maternal behaviours, with only 39% classified as ‘good’ mothers. Dam terminated nursing bouts were 27% shorter in duration than calf terminated nursing bouts; 29% of heifers terminated nursing bouts at least 50% of the time. Only 68% of observed suckling interactions were considered effective. On average, the nursing behaviour lasted 7.0 min, with sucking making up 54% of the total nursing time, the sucking rate was 2.0 sucks/s, and the calves performed 7.5 teat-switches, 2.4 butts and 0.9 teat-strips per min of nursing. In 67% of nursing interactions, the calves sucked on all four teats. By three days p.p., all calves developed a clear, consistent suckling pattern. Prior to this, the calves had shorter nursing bouts, spent less time nursing and manipulating the udder, paused more, switched teats and butted less, and had a slower sucking rate. The behaviour of some calves (i.e., low teat fidelity and high levels of milk stimulation behaviours) suggested that their dam milk availability was low. This study has quantified early post-partum nursing behaviour of neonatal beef calves and highlighted dam and calf behaviours that may adversely affect milk intake and, therefore, impact calf survival.
Factors Affecting Calves Suckling Behaviour Radu I. Neamt; Ludovic T. Cziszter; Daniela E. Ilie ...
Lucrări științifice zootehnie şi biotehnologii,
09/2023, Letnik:
48, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
The aim of paper was to assess effects of environmental and physiological related factors on suckling behaviour patterns. The study was carried out on 120 Romanian Spotted calves. Two behavioural ...traits were considered: total daily required interval and required interval for each meal. Traits were studied according to: calves viability, calving season, and type of calving, calving ease and meal sequence. Significant differences were recorded for calves viability (viable vs. morbid, p≤0.001), type of calving (single vs. twinning, p≤0.001), and calving ease (eutocia vs. dystocia, p≤0.001), being a proof of welfare, conferred by adaptability to new environment. No significant effect was recorded for season of calving (summer vs. winter, p≥0.05). Significant differences concerning required suckling interval, were recorded between meals, both seasons, for viable (p≤0.001), morbid (p≤0.05), singles (p≤0.05) and calves born from eutocic births (p≤0.001). No significant differences (p≥0.05) recorded for twins and calves born from dystocia. Multifactorial regression model used reveals that main effects on studied traits had viability (p≤0.001), type of calving (p≤0.01) and calving ease (p≤0.05). It is reasonable to assume that the knowledge of suckling behaviour contributes to optimal management of calves. Knowledge of these factors helps to develop adequately systems to improve calves suckling response.
Keeping sows in single housing systems with farrowing crates can affect animal health and welfare. The aim of this study was to investigate the behaviour and health of lactating sows kept in a novel ...group housing system which could be easily installed on commercial farms. The housing system had five farrowing pens without crates, a common area and an area only available for piglets. Data from 25 sows were collected in five batches. Sows' location and activity, suckling behaviour and floor soiling were analysed by video or direct observation. Skin lesions were determined using a lesion score. Group housing of sows did not increase the number of skin injuries, since the lesion score decreased during the housing period (19.2 vs. 16.3 vs. 12; p < .05). Before the piglets left the pens, sows were mostly inside the pens (83.4%; p < .05) and the highest faecal-soiling was found in the common area. The common area was used intensively by the sows, particularly since the piglets left the pens (4th week: 63.5%). The suckling frequency remained constant (6th week: 1.2/h); cross-suckling occurred rarely (7.6%). Sows were able to perform natural behaviours in the new housing system, potentially increasing animal welfare.
•GCN-assisted and boundary-guided high-accuracy amodal instance segmentation;•Robust instance segmentation against occlusion and adhesion between piglets;•High-quality motion features describing ...continuity and reciprocation of piglet suckling behavior;•Accurate analysis of the number of suckling piglets in a suckling event.
Piglet suckling behaviour is a critical indicator of piglet liveability and health status; however, automated detection of this important behaviour is rarely reported in literatures. In this study, we proposed a two-step computer vision-based detection method for piglet suckling behaviour. In the first step, an anchor-free deep learning network was employed in instance segmentation of individual sows and piglets. Firstly the localization head detected piglets to obtain the features of the region of interest (ROI). The features extracted from ROI were passed to a novel attention graph convolution-based structure to distil element-wise features. The distilled features were further encoded by a graph convolutional network and were fed into the boundary head and the mask head for piglet contour and mask prediction, respectively. In the second step, the piglets, in adhesion with the sow, were tracked by intersection over union (IOU) which was calculated between adjacent frames. Piglet motion features were derived from the maximum, minimum, variance, and average values in IOU sequence within the 21-frame (3-s) independent processing units. The extracted motion features were input into an SVM, classifying a piglet into suckling or nonsuckling. The dataset, for training and verifying the proposed network respectively, was composed of 100 1-min and 7-fps short video clips as well as one 8-h long video episode, from seven pens of Large White sows and piglets. Our method achieved favourable detection performance with F1 score of 93.6%, Recalls of 92.1%, and Precisions of 95.2% in short video clips, which showed that detecting suckling behaviours for piglets using amodal instance segmentation was feasible. The time budgets of at least one piglet, more than half of the piglets, or all piglets exhibiting suckling behaviour were 74.0 min, 65.6 min, and 1.1 min in an 8-h long video.
Studying suckling behaviour has been used to understand parent-offspring conflict in mammals when the mother adjusts the amount of resources invested into an offspring during the lactation period. ...However, most studies report this information as a by-product of studying other types of suckling behaviour, like allosuckling. We aimed to understand this decision-making process by analysing the filial suckling bouts where the interval from the previous filial suckling bout was known. We used a captive population of threatened dorcas gazelles (Gazella dorcas) as a model species. Our findings showed that the lactation period in dorcas gazelle is characterised by three distinctive behavioural stages, where the behaviour of mother and calf changes rather fast, despite the progressive change in suckling duration. Early lactation (EL), when suckling bouts are always terminated by the calf; mid lactation (ML), when both the mother and the calf indistinctly may end up the suckling bouts; and late lactation (LL), when it is the mother who unfailingly ends lactation events. Also, we found evidence of male-biased maternal investment, as mothers tended to offer more investment towards male calves when suckling Additionally, we confirmed a compensational mechanism whereby calves born later in the birth season were suckled for longer (in terms of duration of suckling bouts) than calves born earlier, resulting in similar weaning dates for all studied calves. Therefore, many aspects may be overlooked if the influence of allosuckling on standard suckling is not considered when analysing suckling behaviour. Thus, we suggest this method of standard suckling behaviour analysis, where all behaviours which may alter the calves' demands and mothers' resources are removed (i.e., suckling attempts, allosuckling, and suckling after allosuckling).
•Dorcas gazelle suckling behaviour is characterized by three distinct stages.•Interactions of mother and calf significantly differ according to the stages of lactation.•Dorcas gazelles show male-biased maternal investment.•Filial suckling analysis plains the bias of calves' demands and mothers' willingness to invest the resources.•Analysis of standard suckling shed the light on behavioural changes during the lactation period.
•The first study to use action density in automated analysis of animal behaviours.•Precise action density estimation and suckling event counting.•High-efficient spatiotemporal feature extraction by ...using different temporal resolution input.
Analysis of piglet suckling behaviour is important for the evaluation of piglet nutrient ingestion, health, welfare, and affinity with the sow. In this study, an action density estimation network (ADEN) was proposed for counting the events of piglet suckling followed by automated analysis of suckling behaviour. ADEN is a two-stream network primarily composed of 1) a network stream that processes video images with a higher frame rate (faster stream) and 2) a network stream that processes video images with a lower frame rate (slower stream). Each stream consists of a ResNet-50 with five convolutional stages. A multi-stage attention connection (MSAC), composed of four Spatial-Temporal-Channel (STC) multi-attention structures, is proposed to bridge Faster Stream and Slower Stream and capture discriminative features. The output attention features from each faster stream stage are laterally fused into the corresponding slower stream stage in a concatenating manner. Following this, the features from the last convolutional stages in the Slow stream and Fast stream are fused using concatenation and are then decoded by using three convolutional layers. The last convolutional layer outputs a heatmap on the action density of piglet suckling behaviour. Finally, the number of suckling events is predicted by integrating all the pixel values in the heatmap. Experimental and comparative tests were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ADEN with a training dataset and a test dataset from 14 pig pens. The 507 video clips (126,750 images for 7 h) from the 1-9th pens were selected as training datasets. The 143 video clips (35,750 images for 2 h) from the 10-13th pens were selected as short-term test datasets. One untrimmed video (162,000 images for 9 h) from the 14th pen was used to ultimately evaluate the action density estimation performance of the ADEN. ADEN was compared with seven approaches and its superiority was demonstrated with an r = 0.938, an RMSE = 1.080, and a MAE = 0.967 in short video clips and r = 0.982, MAE = 0.161, and RMSE = 0.563 in the untrimmed long video. The ADEN proved it feasible to predict the number of suckling events by using action density estimation.
Variation in body weight (BW) of piglets at weaning is a drawback for successful implementation of multi-suckling (MS) systems. The current study investigated the combination of two intervention ...strategies, i.e. the timing of grouping and split-weaning, aiming to improve the BW gain of low birthweight piglets in an MS system and thereby reduce the BW variation at weaning on day 48 postpartum (p.p.). Eight batches of 5 sows with their litters were divided into 4 control (CTRL) and 4 treatment (TREAT) batches. In each litter, the second lowest (LBW) and highest (HBW) birthweight piglets from both sexes were selected as focal piglets. CTRL piglets were grouped on day 8 p.p. and no split-weaning was applied; TREAT piglets were grouped on day 13 p.p. and the three heaviest non-focal piglets per litter were split-weaned on day 35 p.p. Behaviour and feed intake were measured in focal piglets, and BW and mortality were measured in all piglets. Results showed that: (1) Throughout lactation there were no differences in BW or BW gain between CTRL and TREAT, nor were birthweight × treatment interactions found. (2) After grouping, there were no obvious differences between CTRL and TREAT in feeding and suckling behaviours on day 18, damage scores on snout, ear or tail and skin lesions on day 27, nor were birthweight × treatment interactions found. (3) After split-weaning, in week 6, piglets in TREAT tended to consume less feed than CTRL (P = 0.072). Low birthweight piglets in TREAT consumed numerically less feed and spent numerically less time contacting feed during the day than CTRL piglets. In week 6, there was a significant birthweight × treatment interaction in dry matter milk intake (P = 0.030), caused by a higher milk intake of TREAT-LBW piglets compared with CTRL-LBW piglets. In week 6, TREAT piglets tended to be present more at front and middle teats (P = 0.052) and tended to have lower snout damage scores (P = 0.084) than CTRL piglets. (4) Piglet crushing of all piglets in TREAT tended to be higher during the period when TREAT piglets were not yet grouped i.e. during days 9–14 than CTRL (P = 0.087). To conclude, split-weaning of the heavy piglets increased milk intake particularly of low birthweight piglets but this did not lead to a reduction in BW variation at weaning, as the increased milk intake was largely compensated for by a simultaneous decrease in feed intake.
•We studied two interventions on piglet traits in group housing.•Later grouping did not affect within batch variation in weight gain of piglets.•Split-weaning did not appear to improve piglet homogeneity.•The interventions favour the milk intake of low birthweight pigs in week 6.
•The sow’s role beyond nutrition is, in commercial pig production, largely ignored.•We investigated how maternal characteristics contribute to offspring outcomes.•Sows with lower cortisol ...concentrations showed better nursing behaviour.•Piglets from sows with lower cortisol concentrations grew better.•Reducing sow stress during lactation improves sow and piglet performance and welfare.
The importance of maternal care in commercial pig production is largely ignored. The sow has little possibility to interact with her piglets, and piglets are often subjected to early weaning or artificial rearing. This study aimed to investigate aspects of physiological and behavioural maternal provisioning that contribute to offspring outcomes. We hypothesised that better maternal care and nutritional provisioning would relate positively to piglet immunity, growth and behaviour. Nineteen sows and their litters were studied in free-farrowing pens. Oxytocin and tumour necrosis factor-α in colostrum/milk and salivary cortisol were sampled from sows throughout lactation. Sows were assessed for dominance rank, response to handling, maternal defensiveness, suckling initiation and termination, posture and sow-piglet contact. Piglets were weighed, measured for body mass index (BMI) and sampled for blood (Immunoglobulin G; at birth). After weaning, they experienced a human approach test (HAT) and novel object test. Correlations were explored between individual sow characteristics, individual piglet outcomes, and between sow characteristics and piglet outcomes averaged by litter. Significant correlations between sow and piglet factors were analysed at the litter level in mixed models with piglet outcomes as response variables and sow characteristics as predictor variables, while accounting for sow parity, litter size and batch. Litters grew faster when their sow had lower cortisol values (P = 0.03), while sows with lower cortisol levels had more successful suckling bouts and engaged in greater amounts of sow-piglet contact. Litters had a lower BMI at weaning when the sow had a higher milk fat percentage at d3. Litters of the most dominant sows took longer to approach the human in the HAT, while litters of sows with higher cortisol at d0 took longer to approach the novel object when assessed on correlations (r = 0.82, P < 0.001) but not when the model accounted for parity and litter size (P = 0.35). Only some of the measured nutritive and non-nutritive sow factors influenced litter performance and behaviour, with parity and litter size also playing a role. Given the continued increase in litter size, but also the interest in loose-housed lactation pens for sows, further research on sows’ maternal investment and how it can be optimised is warranted.
•Zebra foals suckled longer when seeing another foal suckling too.•Synchronized suckling bouts were less often terminated by mothers.•Interspecific differences were found in synchronised suckling ...bouts.•Social facilitation, in particular co-action effect, influences zebra’s behaviour.
Many recent studies show that synchronisation of various behaviours are advantageous for group-living mammals. However, studies on synchronisation of suckling behaviour inmonotocous species are nearly absent. We observed 49 individual foals of three zebra species in Dvůr Králové Zoo, and recorded a total of 5 890 suckling bouts, almost one fifth (1 036) of which were synchronised (defined as at least two bouts overlapping at the same time). We found that synchronised suckling bouts lasted longer and were less likely to be terminated by the mother than non-synchronised ones. This is in line with social facilitation theory. In addition the occurrence of synchronised suckling bout differed interspecifically. In plains (Equus quagga) and mountain zebra (E. zebra) the probability of synchronised bouts increased with increasing numbers of foals, whereas the opposite result was found in Grevy’s zebra (E. grevyi). We suggest that the interspecific differences may reflect differences in social organisation of respective species as suckling synchronisation rate was higher in species that form nurseries in the wild.
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