Koret School of Veterinary Medicine, Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, The Hebrew University, Rehovot 76100, Israel; Department of Environmental Systems Science, Institute of Agricultural Sciences, ETH Zürich, Zurich 8092, Switzerland.
School of Veterinary Science, University of Bristol, BS40 5DU, United Kingdom.
J Dairy Sci. 2017 Jul;100(7):5724-5728. doi: 10.3168/jds.2016-12201. Epub 2017 May 3.
Metritis, a prevalent disease on dairy farms, is negatively associated with reproduction, milk production, and the welfare of cows. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of monitoring low-resilience activities (i.e., behaviors that typically decrease when energy resources are limited or when the cost involved in the activity increases; e.g., brush usage) in the early detection of metritis. Data on daily brush usage (i.e., proportion of cows using the brush and the duration of usage) were collected from 28 metritic and 60 control cows 28 d postpartum using an automated monitoring system developed for the purpose of this study. During the first week following partum (before clinical diagnosis), we found no differences in brush usage between sick and control cows. However, 8 to 21 d postpartum (the week of clinical diagnosis and the first week of medical treatment), a lower proportion of metritic cows used the brush compared with control cows (0.49 compared with 0.64, respectively, at brushes installed away from the feed bunk). In addition, the daily duration of brush usage was 50% lower among cows diagnosed with metritis compared with control cows 8 to 28 d postpartum (44 s/d compared with 88 s/d, respectively). The results of this study suggest that on-farm monitoring of low-resilience behaviors, combined with existing systems that monitor core behaviors (e.g., activity and rumination), may serve as an improved method for detecting events that compromise the welfare of animals. The slow recovery of low-resilience behaviors following medical treatment (wk 4) might serve as a particularly useful indicator of progress of recovery from disease.
奶牛场常见疾病子宫内膜炎会对奶牛的繁殖性能、产奶量和福利产生负面影响。本研究旨在评估监测低弹性活动（即当能量资源有限或活动涉及的成本增加时通常会减少的行为，例如刷拭行为）在早期发现子宫内膜炎方面的效果。使用专门为此项研究开发的自动监测系统，在产后 28 天内，收集了 28 头患子宫内膜炎奶牛和 60 头对照奶牛的每日刷拭行为（即使用刷子的奶牛比例和使用时间）数据。产后第一周（临床诊断前），我们发现患病牛和对照牛的刷拭行为没有差异。然而，在产后 8 至 21 天（临床诊断和治疗的第一周），与对照牛相比，患子宫内膜炎的奶牛使用刷子的比例较低（安装在远离饲料槽的刷子上分别为 0.49 和 0.64）。此外，在产后 8 至 28 天，被诊断患有子宫内膜炎的奶牛每天刷拭的时间比对照奶牛少 50%（分别为 44 秒/天和 88 秒/天）。本研究结果表明，在农场监测低弹性行为，并结合现有的监测核心行为（如活动和反刍）的系统，可能成为检测动物福利受损事件的一种改进方法。患病奶牛在接受治疗后（第 4 周）低弹性行为的缓慢恢复，可能成为疾病恢复进展的一个特别有用的指标。
