Automatically recorded competitive feeding behaviour as a measure of social dominance in dairy cows

Abstract

The use of automatically recorded competitive feeding behaviour as a measure of social dominance in dairy cows was examined. A microcomputer was used to record the feeding behaviour of a small group of housed dairy cows. These data were then used to create a matrix showing which cows had replaced which other cows at the feeding points. A visual assessment of the social interactions between the animals was also made. The automatically recorded feed-front replacement matrix was found to be identical to the observed dominance matrix. Although there was a very highly statistically significant correlation between the observed and the automatically recorded angular dominance values, the rank orders of the dominance values were not identical. A minimum of 3 weeks of automatic recording was found to be necessary to achieve matrices which were identical with the observed matrix. This limits the possibilities of detecting shortterm changes in dominance, although ways of accelerating the collection of reliable data are discussed.