University Place

Okay, next up I have the honor to produce Dr. Katy Proudfoot, who comes to us from the Ohio State University, where she's housed in the Vet School as the animal behavior and welfare professor, so she's gonna do a little introduction on her own, but please welcome Dr. Katy Proudfoot. (applause) Don't worry, it's just me, and then it's the buffet, so we just gotta get through a little bit more, and I'm really glad we spent the last hour talking about beef because I'm gonna spend the next hour talking about dairy so I don't feel so bad for the meat producers in the room.

So, just a little bit more about me. I started at the Ohio State University about two-and-a-half years ago. I'm from California, but I did all my graduate work at the University of British Columbia in Canada at the Animal Welfare Program. So, a lot of the research I'm gonna show today has come from that program, so they do a lot of the work in cow comfort, which we'll talk about a little bit, but most of my research has actually focused on the cow around calving, so the transition cow.

I have a couple slides on a cows at calving, but really that's where my main focus is, if anyone has questions on that, I'd be very happy to answer. I'm gonna talk a little bit about handling, too, just some of the work that some of my colleagues up in Canada, but also in Australia. We have a collaboration with the University of Melbourne, and they've done some cow handling research. We have a technical issue, so I will-- So, we're gonna pause for a second because we have to figure out where her PowerPoint went.

(laughs) Do you have it on flash-- Oh, there it is, so why is it not coming up? Okay. Is it on the screen is the question. I see it.

All right. Okay, so we'll talk cow comfort, and then we'll talk a little bit about handling. You're gonna get much more about handling later today, so I don't want to focus on that too much. First, I want to introduce where most of the research I'm gonna show you today has come from, the UBC Dairy Education and Research Centre.

Anyone been there, by chance? All right, well if you ever find yourself in Western Canada, I encourage you to go and visit the Dairy Centre. Their door is always open. They do a lot of research there, have a lot of innovative technologies, so if you're ever there, go ahead and pay them a visit.

First thing I'm gonna do is ask you another question. We have to kind of figure out how we define this word, "comfortable." We know what comfortable means for us, but what does comfortable mean for a cow, if we're gonna use the term cow comfort? Out of these two cows, who is more comfortable? How many of you would say the one on the right, on your right?

How many would say the one on the left? Okay, so what is it about that cow that tells you that she's comfortable? She's on the beach, good. She's got this nice deep-bedded sand stall.

(mumbling from the audience) She's got enough room, good. So the stall, it looks pretty wide, looks like she's got some good lunge space. You see the legions on the other cow, good, yeah. So, the other cow has a hock lesion, good eye.

What else? Perching, yeah. So, the cow that's standing with her two front feet in the stall, two hind feet out of the stall, I'm gonna talk about that behavior a little bit today. Still kind of a mystery, but we do have some reasons why we think cows do that.

What else? What's the most obvious thing? She's laying down, yeah, exactly. That's one of the main things, and main ways that we measure cow comfort is lying time.

Good. So, stall usage and lying time. So, not only is she lying in the stall, but if she's not lying in the stall, how is she using it? Is she perching in it?

Is she standing completely in it? How is that stall being used? Lameness and hock lesions, so you couldn't tell whether one of those cows was lame or not, but someone pointed out the hock lesions. And the other thing we can use is something called Preference tests, and I'll give an example of this, where essentially, we're giving cows choice, so we'll give them a couple different options about what we think they might want to lay down on, what we think they might think is comfortable, and then we let them tell us by choosing with their feet, basically.

This picture is an example of a pedometer that we use in research. Anyone have pedometers on their farms? For estrus detection? They're becoming much more commercially available.

This one is one we use in research, but companies like Afi and other companies are developing these pedometers that you can use for both estrus detection and to keep an eye on cow comfort as well in your herds. First, we're gonna talk about lameness. Here's our sound cow. This is what we want to see, right?

She's got a nice, rhythmic head bob. She doesn't really have much of a back arch. She's walking at a good speed. She doesn't show any signs of lameness or abnormal walking.

This cow's the hard cow to pick out. So, this is the mildly lame cow. This is a cow where you can tell there's something wrong, she's walking a little slower, she's got sort of a different head bob, a jerky head bob. Let's watch her one more time.

But you can't really tell exactly where she's sore. You don't know which foot is the lame foot, but she's definitely considered lame, we would just call her mildly lame, or moderately lame. This last cow is the one that we can all pick out. This is the severely lame cow.

Clearly has, in this case, she looks like she's lame on actually a couple of her feet. But she's very easy to tell that she's not feeling well. Hock lesions, the way we score these, this is the Cornell scoring system, which is very commonly used for research, but also if you think about, the FARM Program uses the same, a very similar scoring system, where if you see some hair loss, so in that first picture I showed you of the two cows, that one cow had some hair loss on her hock. It's a score of two.

A score of three is where you start seeing swelling, or you see a lesion on the hock or the knee. So now I'll talk a little bit about how we know, what we know about why cows get lame, why they get lesions, so if you see these things, if you see, obviously, it's really hard to find a farm with zero percent lameness, and zero percent hock lesions, but how do we minimize lameness and how do we minimize hock lesions? So, I'll show some data that's been done, collected from UBC, University of British Columbia, in collaboration with Novus International, that developed the C.O.W.S. Program.

Anyone heard of the C.O.W.S. Program or been on it? A couple of you. So, essentially what they did with their research is

they visited free-stall farms in three regions

the northeast, which didn't include, obviously, Wisconsin, New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, California, and Canada. They went on farm, they put these HOBO data loggers on the cow's leg, so they measured lying time, and then they measured lameness and hock lesions. And then, they went and looked at all the things that that farm was doing. So, what did their free-stalls loOk like?

Did the cows have enough room? Were they using sand bedding? What were the dimensions of the free-stalls? Collected all that to try to figure out what are the risks for farms that have really high lameness, or really high hock lesions?

This first graph I'm gonna show you is one of these regions. Each one of those blue dots is a farm. So if you look at lying time across farms, it's pretty consistent. Anywhere between nine and 11 hours a day.

These are high-lactating cows, so that's a pretty good benchmark. That's what we might consider normal for free-stall housing, is cows to lay down for between nine and 11 hours a day. What's really interesting in this graph, though, are the green pluses and the red pluses, which show you the maximum and the minimum from cows on each of those farms. So, you'll see that in some cases, I don't know if you guys can see.

You see my little arrow up there? Here's the average, but on this farm, you have a cow that's laying down for 14 hours a day. You also have a cow that's laying down for six hours a day. And some of these are really dramatic.

So here, you'll have a cow that's close to 17 hours a day laying down, but this other cow's laying down close to six hours a day. So, the individual lying times varies between the lowest was close to four hours a day, and the highest was close to 18 hours a day. So what do you think that variation is telling you? What do you think's going on with these two cows here?

What are your guesses? Is that a hand going up? She could be in heat, so the cow that's standing up longer? Yeah, potentially.

Four hours a day still not a lot of time, but maybe she's in heat on that particular day. That's a good point. Maybe it's overstocked, yeah. Maybe she doesn't have the opportunity to lay down.

And what they found when they compared these highs and these lows is these are the cows that are either lame or at risk of getting lame. So the cow that's laying down for 18 hours a day probably is already lame because she doesn't want to get up, she's not motivated to go up and eat because she's lame. But the cow that's only laying down for four hours a day, she's at risk of getting lame. She might be already developing some lameness, but she'll become that 18 hour cow if she doesn't get more time to lay down.

This shows lameness in different regions, so each, again, each one of these dots is a farm. California and British Columbia, this is in order. Some of these farms were below 10% lameness on their farm, and this is mild and severe lameness, but then you have some that are closer to 60, 70%. The northeast has a bigger problem with lameness.

I'm sure if we had Wisconsin, you guys would be down here, right? But they had a bit more trouble with lameness in the northeast, for various reasons, right? There's lots more new facilities in California, it's a lot drier in California, there's a lot of reasons why it's probably true. But, the good news is, in any of these regions, you have producers that are doing really well.

So, how do we learn from these guys to help us bring these producers back down? Hock lesions were very similar. Again, the northeast had the worst cases of hock lesions. California was in the middle, British Columbia was the lowest.

And again, we can probably explain some of this with some of the housing practices we'll talk about. And this is both a score of a two and a three, so some hair loss or an actual lesion. But again, in any region, you have the producers that are doing really, really well. So, how do we learn from them to help some of these other ones?

What are the risks? What are some of the things that you think may have affected whether a farm had high lameness or hock lesions? What are some thoughts? From a free-stall.

You guys are free-stall people down here, so I'm gonna pick on you. What do you think? (audience mumbles) Type of bedding, yeah, good. What else?

The size of the stalls. Yeah, we're gonna talk about that. Yeah. Overcrowding, good.

Anything else? General management, so anything in particular? Employees. So, I don't think they were able to capture that very well, but that's very interesting.

That'd be an interesting thing to think about. I know there's been some work looking at how negative handling can impact lameness. I've been on this particular study. So, there's a couple different things that came out as risk factors.

Stocking density, someone mentioned. The size of the stall, so the width, the length of the stall, which can be manipulated by the position of neckrail, the bedding level, bedding type, and dryness, dryness of the bedding actually came out too, so I'll show you just a little bit of research on each of these. From a stall design perspective, basically as soon as you go between 44 to 48 inches, you'll improve lying time. That's where you're gonna decrease your risk of lameness.

There's no difference between 48 and 52, but when you go to 52, cows actually decrease perching time, so they're less likely to perch with wider stalls. Anybody think of a reason why? What do you think they're doing? Yeah.

Yeah, so they're actually trying to get into the stall, and with that wider stall, they can. They can stand at an angle and be fully in the stall, so that's one of the reasons why cows perch, is because they're trying to get to the softest, driest place in that pen to stand on, and that softest, driest place is the stall itself. So, they are trying to get standing in the four feet in the stall. Of course, do we want them to stand fully in the stall?

Is there a reason why we wouldn't want them to? Okay, we'll come back to that. So, the other way you can manipulate perching is to change the size of the stall, so change the position of the neckrail. So, in this study, they looked a more aggressive neckrail position, which was closer to 52 inches, and one where they pushed it back to 76 inches.

They looked at perching behavior, how the cows were using the stalls, lying time, and they also measured lameness. So, cows were in this pen for five weeks and then they swapped and went into another pen for the other five weeks. But they also looked at things like stall cleanliness. If you're moving that neckrail, and cows are standing in the stall, they're more likely to defecate and urinate in the stall, which we don't want them to do, either.

So, stall cleanliness, udder cleanliness, also are things you have to consider. So, this graph shows with neckrail is the more aggressive neckrail, so the 52 inch from the curb. So, they're spending close to an hour, a little bit less than an hour, a day, perching with the neckrail. Standing four feet in the stall, they just weren't able to do that.

Probably because they couldn't fit in the stall. But when you move the neckrail all the way back, they'd certainly reduce perching, but they really just increased the amount of time they stand with their four feet in the stall, instead of completely reducing perching. So, there's another reason why they perch, which I still can't explain. I've heard a lot of different explanations for why cows perch, and I believe a little bit from each of 'em.

But one of the reasons is certainly that the stall isn't long enough for them to stand completely in it. So, when they looked at udder cleanliness and stall cleanliness, of course, those became dirtier. So, you move your neckrail back, you're gonna have dirtier stalls, but when they looked at cases of lameness, pushing that neckrail back really reduced lameness, so it's sort of that paradox of "Can I keep this stall clean enough "by pushing the neckrail back?" If lameness is the main priority on your farm, then that could be something that you try, or you can try to get that sweet spot where it's just far enough where they can urinate and defecate still outside the stall but standing in the stall. In this case, they didn't find any effects on mastitis, but they didn't really have enough cows to test that idea.

But, in this case, we had zero percent mastitis by some miracle. So it was really hard to compare. Okay, so the stall base itself. Deep bedding came out as the clear winner when it comes to lameness.

So, if you're using deep bedding, and this was sand, or sawdust, or dried manure solids, 50% chance you're gonna have fewer lame cows on your herd compared to a mattress. And that's something that we've heard about a lot recently, and might be one of the reasons why the northeast had more lameness was because they have more herds with mattresses compared to California where it's really easy to dry manure and use dried manure solids as deep bedding. Mattresses increased the risk of hock lesions. It makes a lot of sense, compared to sawdust or sand, in this case.

Most of the cows around this study that were on a mattress had hock lesions, some form, which makes sense because it's a harder surface so they're rubbing their hocks on it, and that's what's causing the hair loss. So does that mean if you have mattresses then you're just doomed to have hock lesions and lameness? No, more bedding can help. Ideally, that curb would be high enough where you can put more bedding on it, but in this case, they looked at, sorry this is in kilos, but essentially, the more bedding you put on top of a mattress, the more time cows are gonna spend laying down, and the fewer hock lesions you're gonna have.

In this case, an kilo of bedding was enough to cover the mattress, but you still saw the mattress through the bedding. Seven-and-a-half kilos was like a trash can worth, where when you put it on, there was a thick enough layer where you couldn't see the mattress anymore, so that's really the goal, is to try to keep it at that level. Deep-bedded stalls, just because you have deep-bedded stalls doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna have zero lameness and zero hock lesions it also has to be maintained really well. For deep-bedding, essentially what happens is when cows lay down in it, they start to push out the sand, or the sawdust, or whatever it is, and sort of make themselves a little bathtub to lay down in, and what we found is that basically as that gets deeper and deeper, cows are less and less likely to want to lay down in it.

So, this graph shows two experiments actually, that looked at a decline in bedding and lying time, so as that bedding starts to decline, this is like, the straightest line I've ever seen on a graph they did this experiment twice to make sure that it was true but they did, certainly, see this decline in lying time as you see that decline in bedding. So, the recommendation for deep-bedded stalls is to just maintain it at the level of the curb, so keep it so it's flat at the level of the curb, as best as possible by raking it when the cows are out at milking, twice or three times a day just to make sure it's not getting that sort of bath tub effect. So, the quality of bedding also matters, and this comes back to dryness. There's been a couple studies on this.

I'm gonna show you one that's an example of a preference test but there's been a couple other studies that have looked at what level of wetness in bedding is okay for a cow. Are they okay with some wetness, or do they generally don't like it? In this study, they looked at very dry vs. very wet.

So, very dry was kiln dried sawdust, pretty much as high dry matter as you can get, versus wet, was pretty sopping wet, close to 23% dry matter, so pretty wet. But with those two extremes, you can see a pretty dramatic decline in lying time, so they really didn't like those wet stalls. In this study, they forced the cows into these two pens, so one was your only choice was to lay down in the dry, or your only choice was to lay down in a wet. But this is an example of a preference test is they actually decided to put wet stalls and dry stalls in the same pen and let the cows choose to tell us what they prefer.

So, I'll show you a little video on that. So, here, you can see, you can probably tell what the wet stalls are and what the dry stalls are, so this is a dry stall, wet stall, dry stall, wet stall. There's one cow left, and there's one dry stall left, way over here. So, let's see what she does.

Finally, she finds it. I call her Goldilocks. She's gotta check 'em all out first, but there was very, very clear preference in this study for the dry stalls. They did a couple more studies just to see at what point does that decline in lying time really happen.

And you start seeing it once you get below about 70 to 80% dry matter. So, once it gets lower than that, you're gonna start seeing cows are gonna be avoiding laying down because they just don't like laying down in it. And they replicated this study in summer and winter and found the same things, so it's not just that it was colder or warmer, but they generally don't like laying down in wet stalls, or anything wet. Last thing on the cow comfort side for a free-stall would be overstocking, which someone mentioned.

There's been a lot of work on this, looking at how overstocking free-stalls reduces lying time. In this study, they look at 150% vs. 100%, and found that once you get up to that 150%, you decrease lying time by two-and-a-half hours a day per cow. So it's not just that there's one cow that's not able to lie down, that's per cow.

Pretty much as you increase stocking density, lying time goes down the same way. Cows only need 11 hours a day to lay down, so you need twice as many-- only half as many stalls as cows, right? So, unfortunately cows did not get that memo. Because they're herd animals, they like to synchronize their behavior.

When everybody else is eating, they want to go up and eat. When everybody else is laying down, they want to go and lay down. And if they miss that opportunity to lay down, when everybody else is laying down, they don't come and make it up later, so that's why you see this pretty dramatic decrease in lying time when you start increasing stocking density. Interestingly, too, increasing stocking density of the feeding area also decreases lying time, probably because cows, again, they synchronize their behavior, they want to be up eating when everybody else is eating, and if they can't get in there right away, they're gonna stand and wait to gain access to the feeder, to the feeding area.

Of course, because it's my favorite topic, I'm gonna add a little bit about calving in here, cause we have done some research looking at cow comfort during calving. And here, we're actually drawing from you beef guys, any cow-calf producers in the room? Awesome. So, when a cow is ready to calve, where does she go?

She's out on range. Where do you usually find her when she's giving birth? Yeah. Out on the edge somewhere.

Yeah, so depending on what she has available, often you'll find, there's been some research looking at dairy cows and beef cows, but you find cows go, if they have the opportunity, to find things like tall grass or tree cover, somewhere where they can hide to calve. And they'll leave the herd. So they'll take off in that day that they're ready to calve, and they'll go and hide somewhere to calve. So, we took this idea from the beef industry and tried to apply it to dairy cows housed indoors.

Do cows that calve indoors, did they still have that motivation to hide? So, we think in a natural setting like this,

they're hiding probably for two reasons

one, is they're avoiding predators. They're very vulnerable at this stage, so is their calf, so maybe they're motivated just to hide from predators. The other idea, which is much more important for the beef industry, is it's a way for the dam and the calf to form a bond without interference from other cows 'cause we know calving in group pens in the dairy industry you'll have some cows that are much more maternal than other cows, and if there's a calf on the ground, they might all of a sudden decide, "That's my calf. "That's not your calf," and they'll take over and start mothering that calf, so, this might be nature's way of avoiding that, of letting the dam and the calf form a bond on their own, without interference from other cows, which is important in the beef industry, we prefer them actually to not form that bond in the dairy industry, but the question is, do they still have that motivation to hide?

The way we asked this question was in a very impractical way from a commercial standpoint, but a very good way from a research perspective. This was actually a free-stall pen, ripped out all the free-stalls and created one open-bedding pack for the cows to choose to lay down and calve, if they wanted to, or to go into this large shelter, where they could hide. So, cows were put into this pen a couple of days before calving, so they could get used to both areas. We didn't want them to just avoid this because it was new and scary, and they'd never seen it before, but actually, when we put the cows in, they found it a very good scratching post, so they used it pretty readily.

Then, we measured where they chose to calve. So, this shows number of cows that calved, the shelter versus the open area, so there were more cows that calved in the shelter, compared to the open area, which is interesting. It wasn't as strong as we thought it would be. Then, we decided to look at the data differently, if cows calved during the daytime, or if they calved at night.

And we found a difference. Which do you think was more likely to calve in the shelter? How many of you would say nighttime? How many of you would say daytime?

Daytime was when we saw most use of the shelter. Here, you can see cows that calved at night were these black bars, it's about 50/50. If anything, maybe a few more of them calved in the open area, but if they calved in the daytime, 80% of them used the shelter. So, we're not sure why yet, it could be that just in the daytime, there's more noise and activity.

At night, it was quiet, it was dark, maybe they didn't have that same motivation to hide, as they would in the daytime, but it's certainly something interesting to think about. Here's a video of one of our cows using the shelter. We could only make it the length of the free-stalls, so it's a little tight for her. You can see she's in stage two labor, that the calf's feet are already out.

She's not quite sure what she wants to do yet. She paws at the ground, which is a calving behavior. And she lays down and calves. So what's kind of interesting about this video is that we didn't know what the cows wanted when we built this shelter.

We created an area where it was very secluded on this side, and an area over here where they could see out of a doorway. Statistically, I don't have the data on this, but anecdotally, I can tell you that a lot of the cows calved around here. Maybe it's that they like some element of seclusion, but they don't want to be completely isolated from their herd mates. We tried to take this idea and make it a bit more practical.

We did this in collaboration with the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and created these individual pens. These were 10 by 12, that were directly adjacent to the close up pen, so these cows were preparing to calve, and then we'd move them in here. They were moved about a day before calving, and then we recorded which side of the pen they chose to calve on. In this case, we used about $50 worth of plywood.

I don't know if I would suggest plywood in the future, if you're ever thinking of doing something like this, but there's a lot of creative other ways to think about how to do this.

She really had two choices as to where to calve

on the corner side, where we have this barrier for her, or what I called the window, where she could make head-to-head contact with cows in the group pen. Here, again, we found 80% of the cows used this corner to calve in, so they really wanted some protection in that individual pen This is an example from Wisconsin. Is this anyone's farm? Somewhere in Wisconsin, this was given to me by Dr.

Ken Nordland from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. On this side is where there're calving pens, so they have individual calving pens here, and then they had group pens over here, a feed alley, so lots of noise and activity happening around these pens. So what they decided to do was put up this large curtain in between the two areas, which I think is a really creative way of giving these cows some element of privacy, but not completely blocking them off. So, anecdotally, this producer said that it reduced their distocias, especially with their first calf heifers, and that's the next question that we're going to ask

with our research is

If we give cows more of a secluded environment to calve, are they more likely to calve naturally, without distocia? This is an example from Ohio, a farm that, the maternity pen was right next to the holding area, and the milking parlor around this side. So they decided to just put up a metal barrier in between to help block some of that noise and activity. So, a couple of different ways that producers are taking this idea and running with it.

Okay, so I'm gonna end, we got a couple minutes left, just to really briefly talk about some of the research that's been done with dairy cows and handling. Most of the work that's been done out there has been on beef so there's been a little bit with dairy cows, and a lot of it, you can use the same ideas that we've learned from beef cows in the dairy industry, but I think there's gonna be a lot more from speakers later today to talk about this. So, this is sort of the big picture, again, this is from colleagues in University of Melbourne in Australia. They've been doing research on cow handling and swine handling for the last 30 years, and this is really what they've sort of figured out is that it really starts with attitude.

So, it's really the attitude of the herdsman that affects their behavior, and if it's a negative behavior, that can lead to fear, cows becoming fearful of humans, and that ultimately leads to lower productivity, and both of these can impact welfare. So, this is something that is probably one of the hardest things to grasp and to work with is trying to get at what a person's attitude is towards working with animals. Not only how do you understand that, but then how do you impact it, if you're gonna try to impact their handling skills as well? What we do know is there is a very good connection between whether someone thinks that working with animals is a good thing and how they behave around the animals.

So with dairy cows there's been some research to show negative attitudes are associated with things like, we'll say "pushing" is very aggressive pushing, I think pushing doesn't necessarily need to be negative, but slapping, yelling, tail-twists that are inappropriate, so there is a very appropriate way of doing a tail-twist, there's other ways that can break the tail that would be considered negative. Flight zone we'll probably talk about a little bit more later today, too, but flight zone can tell you quite a few things about a cow. In this case, and everyone here's heard of flight zone? It's sort of that imaginary bubble around the cow, where once you walk into it, she's gonna walk away.

We have two cows here, one with a larger flight zone, one with a smaller flight zone. What do you think could be some of the causes of those differences? Prior handling, yeah. So maybe this cow has had more negative handling in the past or maybe this cow was handled a lot when she was a calf.

Any other thoughts? Genetics, yeah, so there's certainly a difference in temperament traits between different calves. You're gonna have some that are just more flighty than others, definitely. Anything else?

How you approach, yeah, absolutely. So, whether you're coming in through their blind spot, and they don't know you're there, and all of a sudden they see you, maybe their flight zone gets larger versus if they know you're coming. Any other ideas? Age?

Yeah. You think about your heifers versus your adult cows, yeah, so comes with more experience, certainly age has something to do with it. Anything else? Yeah?

How used to that particular person that animal is, good. Yeah, so, we'll talk about that a little bit, about how cows do recognize people, and how they recognize us, so maybe they know that this person is someone I am used to and that's why they have a smaller flight zone. Other things, like if they are in estrus that can impact flight zone, if they're just put on a pasture, that can impact flight zone, there's a couple other things that can impact flight zone. But we do know there is a correlation between negative handling that that cow has received in the past and the size of their flight zone, so that research has been done with that Australian group.

So, the next question was what types of behaviors that we do are taken as negative to a cow? We might think we're doing things that aren't very aversive, what I would call, so they might not seem negative from our perspective, but could be taken as negative from the cow's perspective. So, this was a study where they actually gave, this was another example of a preference test, where they gave cows the choice between two different handling situations, and they recorded which ones they avoided, which ones the cows avoided. So, they created this Y maze, where first they walked the cow through the tail of this Y here, and they took them to one side, in this case, no one, nothing was there, it was just an empty area, and then they walked them to this side and they'd have a person that was shouting.

Then they put them back, put a door up here, and they took away that door, and they let them choose to go on one of these sides of the arm. So if this cow came on this side, what would that tell you? That would tell you that she's avoiding the side with the shout. So there's something with that shout that they just don't like.

So when they compared these different things, they compared hit or shout compared to nothing, and we had a few masochistic cows here, that liked going to the hit or the shout side, but in general, they really avoided those two. Comparing a hit and a shout was about 50/50, so there wasn't very much difference between them. What's really interesting was they had one example where they had a shout on one side and a prod on the other side, and they prodded the cow that came onto that side, and it was 50/50, so that can tell us a couple things. Either they don't think the prod is as aversive as we might think it is, or they think shouting is more aversive than we think it is which is probably more likely the case.

From our perspective, shouting might not seem so loud, but cows have much better hearing than we do, have much larger ears, so that means they hear at much higher volumes than we do, so what we think isn't a very loud shout, they might consider quite aversive. And in this case, in the research study, I don't know why they chose to do this, but they were yelling, "Let's go, let's go, "you stupid cow, let's go." Don't know why they had to call the cow stupid, but maybe she didn't like that either. Okay, so this study they looked at whether cows can recognize people and remember who treats them negatively. How many would you say that they, cows can recognize people and remember who treats them negatively?

So, many of you. That's exactly what they found, is they had cows handled either negatively, so using shout, hit, prod, or positively, so using more of their flight zone to move them, not touching them or yelling at them, by two people wearing the same outfits, and then they had those two people just walk into the parlor when the cows were in there. At this point, they weren't behaving negatively or positively, they just walked in front of the cows. And what they found was that when that negative handler walked into the parlor with them, they showed some physiological signs of stress, like an increase in heart rate, and they also had 70% more residual milk, so they didn't let down all of their milk, compared to when that positive handler was in the parlor.

So they certainly remembered who was the one that treated them negatively. They did a little more research with this, and they found that, really interestingly, cows actually can recognize our faces. They know us by our faces, but it's not just our faces, they recognize us also by the colors we wear, how tall we are, and other features in combination with our faces, but part of it is the face. The very last thing I'll talk about is some research that has looked at training.

and if training can help. Australian researchers visited farms, they measured the amount of negative handling that happened on the farm, and these ranged from zero percent to up to 40% of the time the cows were handled, something negative was happening, like a shout or a hit, and then they correlated that with some aspects of the farm, so they looked at flight zones. Flight zones were larger with the cows that were handled more negatively. Lower milk yield in those farms, and poor conception rates.

I do have to say correlation does not mean causation here, so we don't know if the negative handling is causing the low milk yield or causing the poor conception rates, or if it's just general other management practices that are leading to both. So then what they decided to do is take half of these farms and provide them with a training course in handling that tried to impact both attitude and skills, not just skills, and found that after the training, and then half didn't have that training. Those that had the training had more positive beliefs about handling, so they did get at their attitude, not just their skills, they were less likely to use negative handling, so they recorded that as well, and they believed that the cows were easier to handle, which makes sense. Once they learned how to properly move cows, it became easier to move them.

When they looked at the cows, after the training, the cows had smaller flight zones, so it did impact their flight zone, and production went up, particularly in those farms that had the biggest decline in flight zone, so as you decrease that negative handling, you are likely to increase yield as well, probably because they're not having those problems with milk letdown. There's less stress in the whole environment. So, training is really important, which I'm really glad to hear, that there's a couple of people today talking about training or doing training for handling, and there's a few other people out there that are doing it, and think that what we've learned is that there are techniques out there that we can use that allow us to move cows and handle cows without having to shout, or hit, or kick, or prod them, in most cases. These are a couple resources, I'm sure you can find more.

Merck has Dairy Care 365, with online modules on handling. They also have one on euthanasia for down cows, which I think is really important too to think about. They have it in Spanish and English, and there's a couple other ones. ProHand Dairy is one that the Australian group is coming up with.

This is the one that they did on their Australian herds, and they're trying to bring it to the US, so I will let you know if that ever happens. I'm pretty excited about it. It's coming to pigs first, and then will come to cows, but it's not quite there yet, and the FARM Program has some resources, too, for finding handling training. All right, so I'm gonna wrap up.

Right on time. So, coming back to cow comfort, measuring cow preference, lying time, stall usage can tell us whether cows are comfortable. Improving cow comfort, there's little things and there's big things you can do. So, of course, the big things are putting in deep-bedded stalls, making larger stalls, but smaller things like adding bedding or moving that neckrail can also impact lameness and hock lesions.

And then, negative handling techniques can impact both welfare and milk yield. That's it. If you have any questions, I'll be here the rest of the afternoon, if you want to find me with questions. (applause)