Standing orientation and behaviour of goats during short-haul road transportation

Abstract

A field study was conducted to observe the standing orientation and behaviour among a group of meat type goats during transit by road. Randomly selected goats were observed from 10 runs (10 goats per run) carried out on the same road and the duration of each run was about 50 min. Two observers stood on the deck of the truck and each noted the ongoing activities of five animals. The most frequent standing orientation adopted by goats was parallel to the truck’s direction of travel (24.7±2.1 min) followed by diagonal orientation (11.9±1.6 min) and perpendicular orientation (9.1±1.4 min) during the 50 min road journey. The goats were not observed to orient themselves opposite to the truck’s direction of travel. Although, the animals changed their orientation frequently, apparently to maintain balance, there was a clear bias against the perpendicular and diagonal orientations. Mean frequencies for the various behaviours were: bleating (1.3), jumping (0.7), pushing (0.9), fighting (0.7), falling (3.1), urination (0.5), defecation (0.3) and rumination (0.1). Jumping and bleating mostly occurred at the start of the journey. Virtually all fallings were associated with the driver’s changing speed of vehicle by braking (43.4%), cornering (32.4%), speed bump (12.3%) and acceleration (11.9%). These falls, which hamper the well being of animals in transit and are also responsible for bruising which can be prevented by careful driving and by adjusting the speed of the vehicle gradually.