DAIRY CALF (YOUNG STOCK) MONITORING

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Introduction

The dairy calf is the most susceptible animal on the farm, with the highest mortality and morbidity rates compared with the rest of the herd. Calves face several risks early in life, including failure of passive transfer and insufficient milk feeding to achieve growth potential and avoid hunger (Sumner, von Keyserlingk et al. 2018). Furthermore, the gastrointestinal tract of the young calf undergoes some of the fastest microbial and structural changes in the animal kingdom, increasing the likelihood of diseases and disorders (Meale 2017). The situation is complicated, as calf care is often assigned to the least-experienced employees (Sumner 2018). Additionally, weaning is a particularly stressful period, when the calf is challenged with dramatic dietary shifts. (Meale 2017). Strikingly, the calf stage of the dairy lifecycle has the fewest routinely-collected key performance indicators, relative to other aspects of modern data farming, and problems in calf health and growth may be more closely related to absence of data rather than lack of farmer interest (Sumner, von Keyserlingk et al. 2018).

Even with modern calf husbandry practices, 10% of US dairy heifers die before weaning (USDA 2010), while morbidity rates are commonly 30% and may reach up to 46% (USDA-APHIS 2007, USDA 2007, Urie and Garry 2018, Urie and Garry 2018). The majority of sick calves have digestive or respiratory signs, or both, and are treated with antibiotics (Urie and Garry 2018). Morbidity is highly correlated with mortality – maintaining healthy calves throughout the pre-weaning period is essential if overall mortality rates are to be kept low (Urie and Garry 2018).

After weaning, when calves are moved to group housing, monitoring individual calves for health status becomes even more challenging (Jorgensen 2017). In general, heifers that are sick as calves have impaired future performance, including reduced rate of gain, increased risk of culling, increased age at first calving, and lower milk yield (Waltner-Toews 1986, Correa 1988, Virtala 1996, Heinrichs 2011). Alternatively, optimizing calf health and welfare may have long-term benefits.

This review will cover some major areas of importance related to the development, health, and welfare of young dairy calves, which can be monitored using the Allflex Livestock Intelligence Young Stock monitoring application. These include suckling, rumination, activity, and health (health index, health trend, and system health events).

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Suckling: Nutritive and non-nutritive

Suckling is a highly-motivated behavior in calves and can be divided into two major types – nutritive, in which the calf is ingesting milk, and non-nutritive, which involves suckling on an empty teat, other object, or body part of another calf (cross-suckling). Suckling is important physiologically for the calf because it causes the release of digestive hormones. It is also a behavioral need in young calves; the motivation to suckle is more affected by the time that the calf has suckled thus far than by milk indigestion, meaning that it is not just related to hunger - calves are motivated to suckle even from an empty teat (Miller-Cushon 2015). Non-nutritive suckling increases after milk meals in limit-fed calves, as well as in calves fed milk from a bucket and without access to hay or a teat. It may be indicative of hunger and unfulfilled oral motivation (Veissier 2002, Jensen 2006, Horvath 2017). Calves that are housed in pairs often redirect the suckling from objects to their companion calf as cross-sucking (Pempek 2016), which can potentially inflict injury to the suckled calf.

A decrease in non-nutritive suckling may be a sensitive indicator of disease, perhaps even more so than milk drinking rate or time (Herskin 2010, Hixson 2018). Suckling also reflects other critical aspects of management, such as consistency of milk delivery times, and whether calves are experiencing an unfulfilled behavioral need. When calves are fed from an artificial teat, those fed limited milk spend large portions of the day engaged in non-nutritive suckling at a frequency similar to milk meal frequency in ad-libitum fed calves (Miller-Cushon 2015). Feeding calves from a teat and/or ad libitum allows calves to drink milk more slowly, with improved digestion and less cross-suckling, as well as calmer behavior after the meal, compared to those fed limited amounts of milk or with a bucket (Veissier 2002, Khan, Weary et al. 2011). Given that non-nutritive oral behaviors such as cross-sucking are considered detrimental, monitoring the amount and timing of suckling may encourage more optimal management practices, which promote normal development and reduce undesirable behaviors.

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Rumination: The foundation

Rumination begins as early as the first 2 weeks of life, reaching an average of 5 hours per day at 6-8 weeks of age (Swanson and Harris 1958). Rumination accompanies or precedes the development of normal rumen fermentation and function. In fact, when rumination first develops, solid feed intake is very low. This indicates that normal rumen function must be established before the calf can handle substantial amounts of solid feed (Swanson and Harris 1958).

As development continues, there is a high correlation between rumination time and solid feed intake, with rumination time increasing after weaning once solid feed intake is established (Swanson and Harris 1958, Hepola, Hänninen et al. 2008, Khan, Bach et al. 2016). Trends in rumination can thus give an indication as to the progress in development of the digestive tract in pre-weaned calves. A smooth transition to solid feed intake during weaning accompanied by sufficient rumination promotes higher starter intake and weight gain after weaning is complete (Khan, Weary et al. 2011).

Before normal rumen function is established, B-complex vitamins and high-quality protein are sourced from the milk. However, once the rumen is adequately functioning, rumen fermentation products of solid feed replace milk in providing the calf’s nutritional needs. From an economic perspective, the earlier rumen function is established and solid feed can be used as the primary source of nutrition, the better (Swanson and Harris 1958).

Activity monitoring

Typically, healthy pre-weaned calves rest for prolonged periods of time compared to adult cows; on average total lying time is 17-18 hours per day (Chua, Coenen et al. 2002, Hänninen, de Passillé et al. 2005, Bonk, Burfeind et al. 2013). When sick, animals often experience a combination of changes including fever, lethargy, and decreased appetite and thirst (Hart 1988). One of the reasons why these changes occur together is that sick individual calves will seek to conserve the metabolic energy required to develop the infection-fighting fever by decreasing activity and curling up their bodies to reduce exposed surface area. In fact, the larger the ratio of surface area to body mass, as in small animals such as calves, the more important the need to use behavioral means to conserve heat (Hart 1988).

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In one study modeling early infection in calves, sick calves had decreased rumination and hay eating, less self-grooming, and increased duration of lying and standing inactive compared to controls (Borderas, de Passille et al. 2008). This indicates that measuring behavioral changes, including activity levels, is critical in evaluating the health and wellbeing status of young calves. However, it may be challenging to casually appreciate significant deviations from normal, which could be indicative of problems, when so much of the day-to- day of these animals involves sedentary behavior. This highlights a vital benefit of automated, continuous monitoring.

Changes in calf activity may also be indicative of pain or stress. In the days following dehorning, calves that didn’t receive pain relief spent less time lying down compared to those that did, likely as a result of discomfort (Theurer, White et al. 2012). Similarly, calves that were abruptly weaned were more restless at weaning compared to those weaned in a more gradual manner, likely a reflection of distress around this event (Budzynska and Weary 2008). Therefore, changes in activity, whether increased or decreased, are important to monitor from both a health and welfare perspective.

Health monitoring: What are we missing?

Data suggest that current calf health monitoring practices are inadequate. The sensitivity of producer-generated diagnoses to determine the health status of group-housed pre-weaned calves can be as low as 26% (Knauer 2017). Another study found that the sensitivity of producer-generated diagnoses for enteritis was 58%, and for BRD 56% (Sivula 1996). Visual inspection alone does not always reveal which animals are sick – for example, suffering from a fever (Roth, Keil et al. 2009). In fact, 2.5% of calves that were never reported as ill by staff members died during the pre-weaning period (Urie and Garry 2018). Typically, calf feeders are often the same employees charged with evaluating calf health (during feeding times), and these workers may have trouble simultaneously feeding and evaluating calves (Sumner 2018). Even systems specifically designed to provide comprehensive calf health screening suffer from poor sensitivity. One such method, involving human observations of a variety of clinical signs, has a sensitivity of 48% and specificity of 79.4% for the identification of severe BRD. The researchers indicated that its low sensitivity and challenges in identifying animals with more mild disease, makes it inappropriate for use as the sole method of detection on the farm, and that its accuracy could be improved by

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combining it with additional measures of sickness, such as changes in feeding behavior (Cramer 2016). Surveys suggest that producers would benefit from routine reporting that allows them to track success and identify problems at an early stage (Sumner, von Keyserlingk et al. 2018).

Automated measures have already been demonstrated to be useful in monitoring calf health, and animal wellbeing in general (Weary, Huzzey et al. 2009). For example, changes in milk suckling behavior begin up to 4 days before calves are detected as sick (Knauer 2017). Activity around milk feeding can also be a good indicator of vitality. For example, healthy, hungry calves are more active, head-butting the bottle/bucket more relative to weaker, sicker calves (Herskin 2010).

However, the ability to detect pre-weaned calf sickness using suckling behavior alone can be challenging when calves are fed milk in limited quantities. Indeed, most calves are underfed relative to the amount that they would willingly consume, such that even those with a depressed appetite secondary to sickness will often consume the full amount of milk offered. Ad-libitum milk-fed calves show reduced intake, and at a slower rate, compared to healthy animals (Borderas, Rushen et al. 2009). In contrast, when milk is fed in limited quantities, hay and concentrate intake, but not milk intake, are affected by health status (Borderas, Rushen et al. 2009, Roth, Keil et al. 2009). Sick calves will still visit a calf feeder (Knauer 2017), implying that observing calves (automatically or visually), especially those that are limit fed, during milk feeding is not sufficient for ruling out disease. Once an animal reduces milk consumption it may be quite late in the disease process. (Roth, Keil et al. 2009).

The industry therefore needs calf health-screening tools that enable producers to identify suspect calves efficiently, reducing the need to examine healthy individual calves, using easy-to-interpret and implement data, and preferably based on multiple simultaneous measures to increase accuracy. For example, pre-weaned dairy calves infected with a bacterial respiratory pathogen have less grooming, feeding, activity (more time lying and standing inactive), and social interactions early in the course of their disease compared to healthy controls (Swartz 2017, Hixson 2018). After treatment, milk intake of sick calves normalized, while activity and lying behavior differences continued (Swartz 2017). Because milk allowances vary from farm to farm, and the nature and timing of behavioral changes may differ between disease, it is important to have a multi-modal approach versus only relying on a single measure (e.g., milk intake) (Swartz 2017).

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Recently there is increasing awareness as to the importance of early, appropriate treatment of diseased calves only, both to improve outcomes for sick animals and avoid unnecessary antibiotic use (Glover 2017). Giving calves metaphylactic antibiotics has been demonstrated to have negative consequences for health and growth, while increasing costs (Berge, Moore et al. 2009). The ability to monitor individual calf health accurately therefore has an additional benefit, in that it can promote more focused use of drugs only in symptomatic animals.

What does the Allflex eSense tag monitor and report?

Overall, monitoring young calf health and welfare is not a simple task. Calves develop rapidly, undergoing a suite of physiological and behavioral changes within a matter of weeks. As described above, calves are normally quite sedentary and kept in confined conditions, so that detecting sickness-associated lethargy may be difficult. Furthermore, other hallmarks of bovine health, such as rumination, are not well-established in the first few weeks of life. The Allflex Livestock Intelligence calf monitoring application allows producers to accurately track their calves’ behavior and health within 24 hours of applying the tag (during the first week of life), including getting health alerts even with little historical data with which to compare current findings.

The health index and associated health report, health trend graph and system-generated health events allow producers to monitor current calf health as well as a calf’s historical clinical picture (in HT Pro). The effect of management on health outcomes is now at a producer’s fingertips!

The eSense tag reports individual calf suckling time on an hourly basis, unlike a competitor’s product that includes suckling as part of “eating” behavior (Dennis, Suarez-Mena et al. 2018).

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Examples

71 day old bull calf with pneumonia starting a few weeks after weaning. Calf was treated with antibiotics on Feb 12, 6 days after health alerts began. Both activity and rumination drop as a result of sickness, and recover after treatment.

10 day-old bull calf with diarrhea. The system alerted 24 hours before the farmer treated the calf with antibiotics. The drop in activity improved after treatment. Note that this calf has not yet started ruminating.

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Two views from the same animal illustrating the first month of life in healthy bull calf. Steady activity levels and gradual development of rumination starting at approximately 2 weeks of age are evident. In the full hourly graph, regularly-occurring milk suckling events corresponding to 2 bottle feedings per day are further evidence that this calf is healthy, and indeed, no health alerts were given.

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