Hello and welcome to this webinar exploring the benefits of pair compared to individual calf housing here in the UK. So, my name is Sophie Mahendron. I'm a vet and I qualified back in 2012.
I carried out an internship in a residency programme in production animals based at the RVC, where I graduated with a master's and became a European specialist. I've worked at the University of Surrey, and then I came back to the RVC to carry out my PhD which is based around calf housing. So I'll be using both my research experience and my personal experiences, my partner, and his family dairy farmers, and I've done a lot of calf rearing.
So I'll bring some of that into the webinar to help explain and show how calf housing and rearing can be optimised. So we're gonna be covering the historical management of calves to help us understand where we're coming from, gonna explain some of the science around how calves learn from each other, and then the benefits and challenges of using pair housing. We'll go over some additional work on group housing, and how they can then help your clients to make a success using social housing.
So, when I'm teaching, I like to show this slide and ask the students what the differences are between the two cars in this picture. So on the right, we've got a beef suckler animal on the left, we've got our dairy replacement heifers being artificially reared. And other than the differences in their appearance, physiologically and biologically, there's actually no difference in these animals.
So on the right, the dam, her entire job is to look after and rear that calf. But the girls on the left, it's become our responsibility to provide all that nurturing and care in order in order for the animal to to grow and become a productive animal in the future of the herd. Historically, back in the 18 or prior to the 1870s, we used to keep calves with the dam, so they could suckle naturally, and that would negate the need for additional specific feed or care or calf housing.
As economics and Times changed, we went from predominantly butter and cheese making to liquid milk production. There's a growing population and an increased income that allowed people to purchase more dairy products. And this precipitated a change in the dairy industry where milk yields started to increase, the size of herds increased.
So farms went from a couple of cows to 10s, 20s, if not hundreds of cows. And so this necessitated a change in how we manage the calves. It was no longer practical to leave them with the dam.
And so we needed separate calf housing and rearing and management protocols. But unfortunately, they've tended to lag behind the advances in milk production itself. So in terms of calf rearing, The historic costs, this is only going back a decade, but we're talking in the region of 200 pounds per heifer car calf cost in terms of getting to weaning.
And this work came from a PhD again from the RVC and that range varied massively depending on the farm and the farming system. So we're investing a lot of money, and we're not going to see payback in Investment until at least the 2nd lactation. So we've got lots of things to consider in this forward investment.
We know that Holstein Frisian, calf birth weights can vary. Some of these, calves can be quite petite, 24 kg, and some of them can be really quite big, up to 55 kg. Modern high milk producing dams do predispose to birth of smaller calves.
And the reason I'm talking about this is because targets for age at first calving. Whilst we used to say 24 months, a lot of the progressive dairies and now actually looking at having down at 22 months and some even slightly younger. But what this means with a smaller birth size of calf, and an earlier calving date, we have to get these calves growing.
So historically, again, we've said target growth rates of 800 grammes a day. But now we need to be pushing 900 to 1 kg. In growth rates during that prepubertal period to really get, calves up to bulling heifer size and then adequate calving in weights.
So we don't want them carving in too small, even though they're younger. So we really have to invest in this early period of the calf's life. Historically, people have used lots of individual calf housing.
So a survey back in 2010 suggested 60% of UK farms had individual calf pens. A survey I did as part of my PhD suggested this had fallen to just over 38% of people using individual housing. And I think a lot of this has been driven by a milk contract stipulations, and maybe a better understanding within the industry of the benefits of social housing for calves.
So historically, we individually housed for biocontainment reasons. So we wanted to reduce the risk of spreading diseases, so both enteric and respiratory, so cows that get diarrhoea, cows that get pneumonia and BRD and possibly it was a bit of a compensation mechanism for poor cluster management. So if cars had poor passive transfer, they're at a greater risk of being susceptible to infectious disease.
And so if we kept them away from all the bugs in individual pens, maybe they would do better. But actually our thinking has now changed, and the drive for really good cluster management has hopefully meant fewer calves are now suffering from deficiencies in passive transfer. So again, I did a little survey as part of my PhDs across the UK.
And I asked farmers why they were using the type of calf housing they were. So a common theme was that individual housing helps people to monitor calf feeding behaviour and health. So you can leave an individually housed calf unsupervised with their milk feed, and you can monitor how much they drink.
In a group setting, if a calf doesn't finish its milk, another calf will usually come along and drink it. So it can be quite difficult to monitor feed intakes. Feed intakes are a really important sign of early ill health.
So being able to identify poorly feeding animals, is is helpful and important. And we know that it's a relatively easy and low skilled way to do it in an individual pen. So this means we need to, as well as saying, Using social housing, we need to change and improve our stockmanship.
So this means farmers and calf rearers will need support and training to use social group housing so they can look at different ways of identifying sick calves through behaviour changes, such as activity and other clinical signs, such as pyrexia. We also know from the survey that day to day that's a very low levels of input into decision making ground calf health. So that's why it's really important to have really good standard operating procedures in place on farm to help staff to detect disease, identify it, and then treat it appropriately.
It's important because we know calves with clinical disease have reduced growth rates, reduced activity. Weekly calf scoring alone still misses a lot of disease. So every time a stockman is looking at calves, they need to be doing a subconscious of calf score to try and identify sick animals.
So essentially, we need to upskill farm staff, and then think about integrating precision technologies, such as accelerometers or automatic milk feeders to give us more data to help us detect sick calves in the early stages of disease in social housing situations. Just a final note on on calf rearers. So this is a quote from a paper I really, really like.
So calf carers provide critically important labour, caring for calves at a life stage when they're particularly vulnerable to infection and ill health, the repercussions of which can affect the short and long term health of both individual animals and the wider herd. So investing in the people that look after your cars is, I think fundamental. And as a vet, it's really important to support all levels on the farm to do that.
So back to the matter in hand. So calf learning, we know that cattle are gregarious, they naturally live in social groups. So by putting them in individual pens, this is a form of social isolation.
If we look to the to ourselves as humans, we know that social isolation is defined as an absence or low frequency of peer interactions. So this is exactly what we're doing to our calves. We know that calves use social facilitation.
So there's an increase in the frequency or the intensity of behaviours in the presence of others. And a good example of this is that they will increase the solid feed consumptions in the presence of a feeding companion. We also know calves use social learning.
So this is learning that's influenced by the observation or interaction with other individuals. And this is beneficial for learning social cues that can help them with their life in the milking herd and help them adapt to future changes. So when they're in the herd, they often have changes in feeding or management systems and the environment they're in.
So being reared socially as a calf helps adults deal with those changes really well. The ability of calves to learn is variable. So some individuals are smarter and quicker to learn than others.
So that's something we need to take into account that not all calves learn at the same rate, and some might need some more support than others. When thinking about housing, so going back to our individual versus pair housing, there's a lot of literature out there. There's in excess of 23 papers published in peer reviewed papers.
So I'll just give you a summary of the main findings of these papers. So. We know powerhouse cars consume more concentrate, they tend to have higher growth rates.
This is during the pre-weaning period. We know that there's increased weight gains in pairhouse calves after the weaning period as well. We know that there's twice as much pneumonia in individually housed calves compared to pairhouse calves.
We know, again, there's less diarrhoea in pair house cars. So just overall less disease. Pair housing does seem to have a calming effect on behavioural responses and stressful situations.
So this can be times of disputing or at weaning. So individually housed cars will vocalise more when they're weaned. We know pair house calves are bolder, and they develop more competitive skills.
Individually housed calves tend to spend more time inside their hutches, and they perform more poorly in cognitive performance tests. Individually housed calves demonstrate more reactivity to novel objects. And so they're all negative implications of individual housing.
Conversely, we know per house cars are more active. And we know that cars will exert effort to be in social contact with each other, and they do prefer full body contact over just head contact alone. So a lot of the research I've just sort of quoted being carried out in other countries.
So in the Americas, Canada, in Europe, and so I want to know for my own PhD work, whether all of those findings still applied on our UK commercial systems. And essentially, the answer is yes. So all of those things do still happen, all the benefits that we've seen in the literature compa housing compared to individual housing, they do apply in the UK commercial systems.
So I'll go through some of my research findings to show you some of the evidence bases for why we should encourage pair housing. So I did a study comparing the age at which calves are pair housed. So I compared cows that remain completely individually housed up until weaning, cows that were paired immediately at birth to weaning, and calves that were initially individually housed, and then became pair housed at 3 weeks old.
I visited these calves for 10 consecutive weeks from birth to weaning. And they were all housed in outdoor hutches. So the data from the study found that there was no difference in average daily weight gains.
But I think it's worth mentioning that this was quite a milk restricted feeding setup. So these cows are 3 litres twice a day. So potentially that might have masked some of the benefits of the increased growth rates.
However, we did see pairing from birth gave the greatest increase in concentrate intakes. So 8.8 kg in individually housed individually housed calves, 9.8 kg of concentrate consumed, when paired from 3 weeks, and 12.3 kg when the calves were paired from birth.
So that's the total concentrate. Intake from birth to weaning. So not a there's not daily intake, this is a total concentrate intake over that 10 week period.
You can see in the graph, that's the actual daily intake. So, they do take a long time to start consuming significant amounts of of concentrate. An interesting little note is at week 8, these cows moved from the individual pens into the big social housing just prior to weaning and the movement actually knocked the individual growth rates.
So it's stressful for calves to move from one social situation to another. And that can be something to consider if you're seeing issues on farm when calves move, either physical location or social groups change that they can have a knocking their own growth rates. I then did another study.
So this is a longer term study where we enrolled calves and put them in either individual or pairhouse calves, pairhouse pens. And I followed these calves through to the end of their first lactation to see if there were any longer term differences. .
So this is a photograph of the barn. So they're in prefabricated hens within a larger shed. Again, I visited them weekly during that pre-weaning period and then used farm records to monitor them through that first lactation.
We also had a subset of calves where they had activity monitors on them. So we could compare an activity and pair compared to individual pens. And I also collected video footage and looked at different behaviours to compare them.
This is just a summary of the numbers of cars involved in that study. But I think one of the biggest takeaway messages from The results was actually the only 70% of the enrolled heifers, so the girls born, actually made it to the end of first lactation. So I only recruited heifers, and these are all dairy breeds, both Holstein Frisian and Jersey calves.
So that attrition rate is repeated in multiple studies from the UK. I think it's something to highlight in terms of economics and wastage. And sustainability that actually we're losing a lot of animals, not necessarily through death, but through culling due to poor fertility, or other reasons.
So that's something as an industry we definitely need to work on. So looking at survival compared to our pair housing and individual housing, we know that pairhouse calves had a reduced risk of exiting the herd. And this was due to both death and culling.
So the culling could be voluntary. And the death was obviously involuntary. So there's a clear difference in survivability.
We also know that pairhouse calves experience significantly less disease during the pre-weaning period. And this mirrors other findings that I mentioned in the summary of the literature. So 67% of calves individually housed experienced some sort of pre-weaning disease versus 32% or 33% in the pair house calves.
It's worth noting that within pairs, 38% only had one calf experienced disease. So it's often common for farmers to be worried that in pair housing, once one calf is sick, the other calf will definitely get sick. And that's not necessarily the case in in mild disease incidences.
. There was no effective housing on post weaning disease occurrence. Post weaning, 54% of heifers experienced at least one disease incidence. But that could include, things like ocular issues, lameness, as well as the typical diarrhoea and pneumonia that we think of as the pre-weaning, calfing calf issues.
In terms of average daily life weight gain from birth up to pregnancy, so we use electronic scales to collect data on a bimonthly cycle up until they were confirmed as being pregnant. The average daily live weight gain over this entire period was 720 grammes, but there was quite a big range within that. So looking at the range of growth rates is really important for calves, not just the means, because it's the girls at the lower end of that range that are going to be the problem calves.
Again, if you look at the graph, the white circles indicate the average daily growth rates. You can see that upward trajectory during that pre-weaning period. So we know cows don't grow at a consistent rate for many weeks.
It takes a while to get going. So again, averages can hide that initial very poor growth rate. So they they rocket up until Sort of 4 months old and then remain quite stable in their average daily growth.
And it's interesting to look at the looking at the actual body weights of these calves, and the the weights they're reaching. There was no Sort of significant difference in the difference between a pair or within a pair of the average daily growths. So some other studies have found that there can be significant differences between the calves and we'll touch on that again a bit later.
Disease calves did have reduced growth rates compared to calves that stayed healthy. And that just, mirrors all the things that we know about sick calves just not growing very well. And we know that there's more disease in those individually housed calves, so the growth rates would have been more more affected there.
When thinking about calf activity and behaviour, 90 calves in total had accelerometers put on them. And this is really interesting to see how they, reacted and . Differed in their behaviour patterns.
So in terms of lying times, cars spent nearly half an hour a day more in individual pens lying down and their pair house counterparts. But there was no difference in their motion index, which is basically a measure of the activity. So even though individually housed cars lay down more, that when they were up, they're actually just as active.
Interestingly, . I think the the reason for the increased lying time was probably just a lack of stimulation and activity, which probably led to that increased lying time. We also use video footage to look at their actual behaviours.
So we were very interested in. Non-nutriative oral behaviours. So these are commonly referred to as cross sucking behaviours.
And it's probably no surprise to learn that the pair house cars spent more time cross sucking because they had a friend to cross suck on. Individually carved individually housed cars do still cross suck, but they do so on inanimate objects. So they lick and suck on the pen.
Walls on the pen fixings on buckets. So they do still show this abnormal behaviour, but it's often not noticed so much by farmers. It's much more obvious when calves are cross sucking on each other.
Interestingly, calves spent individually house calves spent more time with their heads stuck out to the front of the pen. And again, I think they're probably looking for social interaction and stimulation, and individually house calves spent longer self grooming than the pair house calves who spent longer co-grooming each other. So again, a lack of that social bonding, which is really important for for calves, and they're having to sort of make up for this by by self grooming.
Which can potentially be construed as an abnormal activity if they're doing this excessively. Thinking then about fertility. So we compared the individually housed and pair house calves in terms of multiple different fertility parameters.
. But there was no difference between individually impaired house calves in terms of age at first service, the number of services taken to become pregnant, or the probability of reaching part tuition. However, breed did have a significant difference. So here in the table, you can see a comparison of the Holsteins versus the Jersey calves.
So there was a significantly lower number of Jersey calves, but the trend in that data is still quite interesting. So the the jerseys took more inseminations to become pregnant. They had a lower average daily life weight gain up until pregnancy.
They had a lower body weight, but that would be expected given the difference in stature. And they had a 10 day older mean age at first carving than the Holsteins did. So out of the recruited heifers that survived, .
71% gave birth to live calves, so again, it's just showing that attrition rate. Just shy of the 30% didn't even make it to calving. And then there's only a small loss between carving and the end of the first lactation.
So it's in that bullying period, that probably due to poor fertility, and the heifers were lost. So we know breed matters. So the breed of heifer was associated with that growth rate in the study is also actually related to thoracic ultrasound score.
So Jersey cows tended to have a worse thoracic ultrasound score. So we were looking at lung health there. And we know that the the heifers required more inseminations to become pregnant, and actually their first born calf mortality was was lower, so it was higher.
So for the heifers that we initially recruited, we looked at the survival of their subsequent calves and jerseys. The calves had a lower survival rates, interestingly. So Jerseys just physically smaller than Holstein's, and there may be breed specific differences that mean optimal management requirements that are good for Holstein's, don't work so well for the Jersey breeds.
So people that have different breeds in the herd, probably need to think about optimising their management strategies differently for two breeds, because they don't appear to work well for both. So some of the big herds will keep, a Jersey subsection, to help with milk solids. So it's worth bringing that, sort of management.
Difference or raising it as a possibility with farmers because they might not realise there's there's such a big difference. In terms of milk yield and other health of the pair compared to individually housed calves, 316 heifers completed a 3 or 5 day yield. There was a difference between the Hostes and the jerseys, but that's to be expected.
So this was a high yielding herd. The the first lactation heifers were averaging over 10,000 kg of milk. There was no association of the housing type with the actual milk yield.
But if you took survival differences into account, because more pair house calves survived to the end of first lactation, they actually produced as a group significantly more milk than the individually housed calves. And that's just down to survival. We did have 95 heifers experience other health problems.
This is an accumulation of mastitis, high somatic cell count, or loss of a quarter, and the odds of having a health issue will lower in the individually housed calves. So 17 or just shy of 18% of individually housed calves had other health issues compared to 29% of pair house calves. There were no specific .
Relationships noted between ongoing cross sucking or inter sucking, in the pairhouse calves, but it was suggested by the farm that that might have been an issue. So whether pairhouse calves and their cross sucking habits may possibly lead to other health issues, that's something else that needs to be explored. But.
There's no firm evidence either way as to the reason for that difference in other health issues. But as I say, even with those, the pairhouse calves overall gave more milk because more of them survived. So just to summarise the findings from all that work.
So pairhouse calves had a reduced risk of exiting the herds. They had better survivability. Pairhouse calves experienced significantly less pre-weaning disease.
There was no significant effect of preeing pre-weaning housing type on overall average average daily life weight gain or fertility parameters. There were significant differences in behaviours. So we know individually housed calves spend longer with their heads stuck out of the pen, and longer self grooming, which is probably indicative of looking for social interaction.
We know that individually housed calves had reduced odds of other health. And so we just need to consider The time spent engaging in crosstal behaviours. So I'll come on to that and how we can mitigate it.
There was no difference in the 3 or 5 day milk yields, but if you take survival into account, the pear house calves did produce more milk. So a little roundup of that is calves do like to have a friend. They do perform better with social housing.
And it's definitely something that as an industry, we need to move towards ensuring calves have. So how can we help with farmers utilising pair housing? And it's not just as easy as sticking two calves in the same pen.
So, Pen design has a lot to do with success, the ease of feed monitoring, the ease of detection of disease, how we can mitigate cross looking, all of these things are very real and practical issues that we need to help our farmers work through in order for them to stick with the social housing arrangements. So we don't want people to have a go at it, feel it doesn't work, and then revert back to using our individual housing because they can't cope. So a lot of people still using car footches.
So lots of pros and cons to them. . If we need to transition from individual hutches into a pair setting, there's a few ways you can do it.
They all entail having to make the outside run area, a combined space. So either cutting and sort of cable tying the mesh areas together or just making completely new outside run enclosures. It can work well if you initially are having trouble with calves not feeding well to place a gate between them, especially at feeding time.
And that way you can leave calves and supervised with the milk, and then come back and remove the gate. So following feeding, they're back to being pair housed. Some people have issues, especially with smaller cars that they might try and escape through the gap between the two hutches.
So you can fill that gap either sort of attaching some. Plastic sheeting, to fill the gap, so small cars can't sort of wriggle out through an escape. So that's just something to to flag.
I think it's interesting, which is can be quite wet here in the UK and so making sure cars have adequate protection from rain and wind, and conversely in the summer, actually making sure these calves aren't getting too hot in those pairs in those individual and pair housing, which is is quite important. Another way of pair housing cars can be to use the group hutches. So you can put two cars within a group hutch.
Some people don't like to give them the outside run just due to logistics. And so you can see on the right there, the jerseys don't have access to the outside. They're shutting the pair pen.
It can be really nice in winter, they get a nice microclimate. But again, you do need to be very, very careful in the summer that these become very, very hot and humid, which can predispose to disease, just through heat stress. .
It's, it works quite well, especially if they do have the outside run and put two calves in a in a group hutch like that can be quite nice. Another way of orientating individual hutches to combine them into pair hutches is actually to put 7 ft gates between them. So putting them face to face and putting gates along each side.
So this was a way of using the the individual hutches without the fact of trying to meld the outside runs together. And I think it works really, really well. So the farmer came up with a solution and I quite like it, just require the purchase of gates.
But then, I think they're much, they're nicer to look at and much smarter. And they worked really, really well. And it's interesting with the weather.
It gives the cows an option of which which they want to to be in, in terms of wind and rain and sun. So that's quite a good option. So I mentioned cross sick sucking and non-nutritive oral behaviours are a common behavioural complaint when you're socially housing calves.
It's a behaviour that all artificially calves seem to exhibit. And this is heightened by restricted milk allowances and not being able to suckle for long enough. So cows have an innate drive to suckle on things.
So if they don't spend long enough drinking milk, they will still need to suck on something else. So individually house calves do still cross suck. They just do it on inanimate objects.
So we do need to provide enough milk in the correct format. So making sure they have the opportunity to suckle. So bucket reared calves, tend to gulp their milk, and then they have a really strong drive to cross suck.
We need to make sure they're getting enough milk, so 20% of body weight. And we can provide enrichment. So other things for calves to suck on and play and keep them distracted.
So dry teats on the wall, toys, . Bedding down after milking, so they've got things to play with can be really helpful. So how do you decide which calves you want to pair together?
So there is work to show that when a big calf is paired with a small calf, actually that that smaller calf will not do quite so well. So the the large calf grows better. The large calf displays less fear and more exploratory behaviours.
And so it's important you try and match calves, for rearers that are keeping both beef crosses, a pure dairy breeds, and both sexes, it might be a good idea to think about pairing in same sex, same breed pairs if possible. . As I mentioned earlier, if one calf becomes sick, it doesn't necessarily mean the other calf in the pair will experience disease.
So in my data set, only 10% of both calves with a pair experience disease. . If they're very clinically unwell, it might be a good idea to separate them just to allow better nursing care.
But they do still for having a social friend when they're feeling ill. So trying to match calves together and also keeping the age range as low as possible. So that can again be challenging in small herds where there's not a calf being born every day.
So he wants to try and minimise age differences. Definitely less than a week, ideally just a couple of days, age difference maximum. So the older calf tends to be stronger and more dominant, and that can exhibit the same sort of problems as having a large calf with a small calf.
So Whilst pair housing is, is clearly much better than individual housing. Actually, I wonder if we maybe should be moving towards just larger group housing, and potentially utilising our technologies such as automatic calf feeders. So group housing can range from 3 to 30 calves.
They can be, Using automatic milk feeders, they're often sold as being able to cope with up to 30 calves on them, but actually, you don't want to overstock single teats, because you get a lot of queuing and aggression. So housing in groups helps with farm management because it reduces time commitments for feeding and bedding up. So In a little study comparing times taken to care for calves, we know that Less than 1 minute a day per calf in a group compared to 10 minutes a day per calf in individual housing is the distribution.
So it's a big saving in time if you can group pals. It's common for farms to report high disease incidences in group house calves. And we do know that the larger the group size, the more disease prevalence that tends to be.
So, 6 to 9 calves is a better group size idea than 12 to 18. But again, you need to think carefully. If you are using automatic milk feeders, people will often have a few more calves on, just due to the economics of the calf machines themselves.
Housing calves in larger groups does tend to lead to increased cognitive performance and behavioural flexibility. And we think this is probably due to the higher variability in the environment, the more interactions, and the, the more play and exploratory behaviours, which is good, from both a welfare point of view and for life in the milking herd. Calves housing groups of 6 have been shown to eat more solid feed and start ruminating earlier than those in individual pens.
So it mirrors the individual versus pair housing where the pair house cars eat more food. This is again increased when you move to bigger groups. So this is all great for room and development and that weaning period, and becoming much more successful in group house calves.
We also know group housing tends to increase space allowance per calf, and that just increased. Much more, which is great for welfare, and great for, so the societal expectations that the public have in these artificial rearing systems. So I mentioned feeding, so I'll just go over some of the recommendations that we now have.
So we know that cows can happily consume 3 litres of milk 3 times a day. So this is from work that I did using automatic milk feeders in my PhD. So, the maximum amount of milk I saw consumed in a day was 17.9%, 17.9 litres of milk.
So it is possible for calves to really, have accelerated milk intakes. But that was, that's not a consistent level. They averaged out at 9.6 litres a day.
So We know heavier cows will voluntarily consume more milk. So it's worth thinking about in fixed rate feeding systems where people just feed a flat 3 litres twice a day. Calves are born at a heavier weight.
They they naturally need more milk for their own metabolic requirements and then for growth on top. So, Again, it comes down to practicalities, but having higher feeding rates for bigger calves, will maximise their their individual potentials. So yeah, new recommendations are really pushing towards feeding milk equivalent to 20% of body weight to enable calf potential with respect to growth and organ development through anabolic metabolism, and also for maximising epigenetics.
So we know that we can switch on important and useful proteins to improve calf performance. And then actually that knocks on to adult performance. So we really have to fuel these calves in the first few weeks of life and feed them a lot of milk.
So if we're still dealing with systems using manual twice a day feeding, we can still still increase feed volumes starting at 6 litres. They'll take 3 litres in a feed if they're happy and well. You can step them up to 8 litres a day and then 10 litres a day, and season in twice a day feed.
So 3 litres, 4 litres, and 5 litres twice a day. It's then important to have a nice Long wean down period. So if they're drinking a lot of milk, it can take them slightly longer to start eating large amounts of concentrate.
They often do still eat, concentrate, but you want to make sure you don't rush the transition period, which can lead to stress and disease outbreaks. So a 4 week wean down period with gradual weaning can be the best way to optimise sort of growth and performance over that weaning period. So, When I looked at calf behaviours around automatic milk feeders, and thinking about social interactions, we found that calves didn't appear to have preferences for feeding with other calves.
So they'll go up and feed with any calf. So, Although, . We often see calves sort of hanging out in social groups when it comes to feeding, they don't mind who they feed with.
When milk feeding resources are limited, so when you have one teat in an automatic feeder for a pen of 20 calves, you do see displacement behaviours occurring. So, When I looked at mixed sex groups, the the females were displaced more than the males. So it might be helpful to have single sex pens and possibly separate beef and dairy breeds, and just to help reduce bullying that can occur.
So overall, we know that calves do have friends, and they do perform better in social housing, definitely in pairs, and maybe thinking towards using larger group housing. So it's important for health. We know that pair house calves had less disease.
It's important for behavioural development and for learning. This shouldn't really be a surprise given the evolutionary origins of cows. They are gregarious, they naturally live in groups where, youngsters and adults live within large group sizes.
So I think in these domestic situations where we're artificially rearing them. We should look to to utilise these inherent behavioural traits to help optimise the experiences of the cows that are in our care. So if they live in groups in the wild, where they should be living in groups on our farms, and we need to find ways to make sure that can happen.
In a successful manner, both for the calf, but she also for the farmer, they need to feel that the cows are performing as well as possible. And they can need quite a lot of support and to ensure that that happens. So hopefully, this webinars giving you some ideas of why we need to socially house our calves and things to think about when introducing it for successful implementation on your clients' farms.
So I just like to say a big thanks to my RVC supervisors who helped with all the work in my PhD as well as to the farms that collaborated with that research work. So without them, obviously none of that would have happened. I had funding for my PhD through the bar and benevolent Foundation, fantastic supporter.
Of cattle research and also to HDB for funding the project as well. So I hope you enjoyed, learning about, social housing for calves. And thank you very much.
