Abstract
We assessed dairy cows’ body postures while they were performing different stationary activities in a loose housing system and then used the variation within and between individuals to identify potential connections between specific postures and the valence and arousal dimensions of emotion. We observed 72 individuals within a single milking herd focusing on their ear, neck and tail positions while they were: feeding from individual roughage bins, being brushed by a mechanical rotating brush and queuing to enter a single automatic milking system. Cows showed different ear, neck and tail postures depending on the situation. When combined, their body posture during feeding was ears back up and neck down, with tail wags directed towards the body, during queuing their ears were mainly axial and forward, their neck below the horizontal and the tail hanging stationary, and during brushing their ears were backwards and asymmetric, the neck horizontal and the tail wagging vigorously. We then placed these findings about cow body posture during routine activities into an arousal/valence framework used in animal emotion research (dimensional model of core affect). In this way we generate a priori predictions of how the positions of the ears, neck and tail of cows may change in other situations, previously demonstrated to vary in valence and arousal. We propose that this new methodology, with its different steps of integration, could contribute to the identification and validation of behavioural (postural) indicators of how positively or negatively cows experience other activities, or situations, and how calm or aroused they are. Although developed here on dairy cattle, by focusing on relevant postures, this approach could be easily adapted to other species.
Highlights
The aim of our study was to identify variation in the body posture of dairy cows focusing on ear, neck and tail positions while they are engaged in different routine activities
We found significant differences between the positions of the ears, neck and tail of the cows during the different activities and, in the combined analysis, these were clustered making it possible to describe the typical body posture of a cow performing the routine activities of brushing, feeding or queuing to be milked in the stable
We selected three focus activities where cows were stationary and recorded body positions that were potentially unrelated to the performance of the behavioural activity itself
Summary
The aim of our study was to identify variation in the body posture of dairy cows focusing on ear, neck and tail positions while they are engaged in different routine activities. We aimed to use this variation to make predictions linking specific body postures, or combinations of postures with where the animal might be located in the two dimensional model of core affect [24] [25]
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