Dairy Science Commons^™

Personality Traits Of Dairy Calves And Their Relationship With Feeding Behavior, Activity, And Performance, Emily A. Michalski

Theses and Dissertations--Animal and Food Sciences

Detection of individual differences in personality traits of animals may prove beneficial for producers to help tailor management for individuals and to make selection decisions. Therefore, the objectives of this thesis were to

1) review and evaluate literature on relationships between individual cattle personality traits and feeding behavior, activity, and performance; and

2) evaluate and develop tests suitable for characterizing crossbred dairy-beef calves’ personalities and associations with behavioral patterns and performance.

The existing literature indicates that growth, intake, activity, and milk production measures from precision technologies have associations with cattle personality traits and behaviors identifiable through standardized tests. This indicates …

Utilizing Precision Technologies To Validate A Real-Time Location System For Dairy Cattle And Monitor Calf Behaviors During Heat Stress, Emily Rice

Theses and Dissertations--Animal and Food Sciences

With the increase in on-farm precision dairy technologies (PDT) utilization, large quantities of information are readily available to producers. A more recently available technology for use in livestock species is the real-time location system. These technologies offer dairy producers the opportunity to monitor and track real-time locations of cows, track locomotion patterns, and summarize specific area usage. However, the usefulness of these insights is heavily dependent on the performance of the technology. Therefore, the first objective of this dissertation was to assess the positioning recording performance and the usefulness of the data recorded of a real-time location system (Smartbow GmbH; …

Precision Livestock Farming And Personality As Tools To Understand Dairy Calf Individual Variation In Performance, Behavior, And Response To Stress, Megan Marie Woodrum Setser

Theses and Dissertations--Animal and Food Sciences

Individual differences impact animal responses to their environments and can be observed with animal personality (stable behavioral differences with populations) and food neophobia (avoidance of unfamiliar feeds). These individual differences can influence cattle performance and welfare. Precision technologies, such as automatic feeding systems (AFS) and accelerometers continuously measure feeding behaviors and activity and may allow us to relate individual differences to behaviors in the home environment. Therefore, the first objective was to determine if food neophobia was associated with feeding behaviors measured by AFS. Food neophobia was associated with rewarded visits to the AFS, but to no other feeding behaviors. …