Introduction:
Cattle are highly social herd animals and engage in complex interactions to communicate dominance, subordination, and peer bonding within the group. Herds have a strict (predominantly) linear hierarchical structure with the most dominant animal at the top and the most subordinate animal at the bottom. Social rank is largely predicted by age and body weight/size. Older animals have more experience and are thus better placed to compete and larger animals are more capable of physically domineering their smaller herd mates. When individuals first meet they “fight” to establish rank. Once hierarchical structure within a group is established, negative interactions become less common except when animals compete for a limited resource e.g. access to feed, preferred lying areas, access to the milking parlour, etc, or when closely-ranked animals seek to re-establish or alter the dominance order.
Feeding and Milking Behavioural aspects for production:
Feeding behaviour: They adapt their feeding speed according to the feeding system (Wierenga and Hopster 1991).
If dry matter intake and thus yield is to be maximized across the whole herd it is important that the impacts of the social hierarchy are considered at the farm level. It does not matter how carefully formulated a diet is or what dry matter intake predictions have been calculated if other external factors reduce the intakes which animals actually achieve.
When individuals enter or re-enter an established group they must establish their social rank within the herd. This can only be achieved by interacting with all the animals they meet. Hence it often takes a number of days or even weeks for animals to establish themselves following introduction to the herd. Even in herds with a stable hierarchy, social rank remains important when limited and/or valued resources such as feed or access to feed are considered (e.g. cows of lower social rank were displaced from the feed bunk more often, particularly at high stocking rates (Huzzey et al., 2006) and high ranking cows spend more time at the feeder following the provision of fresh food (Val-Laillet et al., 2008).
Holstein cows that were fenceline fed a TMR of corn silage and concentrates ate 26% longer following feeding than the same size group eating from bunks around which they traveled. Cows eating with their heads in the downward position produce 17% more saliva, which directly affects rumen function, than cows eating with heads held horizontally. When fed in shallow, elevated bunks, 10% of cows exhibited year-round rooting, sorting, feed tossing behavior, and feed wastage (0 to 5%). Groups fed at ground level or in headlocks showed little or no feed tossing behavior (Albright, 1993). Feeding behaviour can be described using several measures, including the number and duration of meals, as well as intake and feeding rate. Competition at the feed bunk can affect feeding behavior, increasing the feeding rate and reducing intake, especially for subordinate animals. Feeding behavior changes in the days before calving and these changes are greatest among cows at greatest risk of succumbing to the disease in the early post partum period (Von Keyserlingk and Weary, 2010). The frequency distribution is clearly bimodal, with the intersection between the two peaks occurring at about 25 min. This breakpoint can be used to define within-meal intervals (represented by the peak on the left with a maximum at about 0.5 min), and between-meal intervals (the peak on the right of the graph with a maximum at about 180 min).
According to this approach, an interval of less than the break point (called ‘‘meal criterion’’) can be defined as within a meal (Tolkamp et al., 2000). Two feeding events separated by a break of only 10 min would be considered by this definition as being part of the same meal, but if the cow returned to the feeder after a break of 50 min we would consider this event to be part of a new meal (DeVries et al. 2003a, 2009). Meantime for concentrate mixture intake was less (P<0.05) in docile buffaloes in comparison to nervous buffaloes (6.67 vs. 8.62 min.) in lactating Murrah buffaloes (Singh et al., 2016). Grant and Albright (2001) report that there is unlikely to be a measurable reduction in DMI providing a minimum of 0.51cm of bunk space is provided. Increasing bunk space above 0.5m may not have significant effects on DMI, doubling the amount of feeding space per cow from 0.5m to 1.0m resulted in a 57% reduction in aggressive interactions and allowed cows to increase their feeding activity during the period following the provision of fresh food (DeVries et al., 2004). Cows were displaced more frequently from a post and rail feed barrier, compared to a barrier composed of headlocks (Huzzey et al., 2006). When cows lay down during rumination, they prefer to lie on their left side. The rumen is positioned on the left side and therefore the rumination will be the most effective (Grant et al., 1990).
Milking behavior:
The water buffalo is the second most important species in the world in terms of milk production, after dairy cows (Coroian et al. 2013), and produces the highest quality milk of any domestic animal (Senosy and Hussein 2013). The total milking time was significantly more (P<0.05) in nervous buffaloes as compared to docile buffaloes; the respective values were 26.3 and 15.65 minutes (Singh et al., 2016). Buffaloes are very sensitive to the milking environment than the cows and a slight change in milking operation lead in little let-down of milk (Thomas et al., 2005). Less milking temperament significantly increases (P<0.05) milk yield in buffaloes (Ramasamy and Singh, 2004). The docile buffaloes had a higher rate of concentrate intake, shorter let-down time, slightly longer milking time, higher daily milk yield, higher milk flow rate, and higher milk fat than the other groups of buffalo (Nayak and Mishra, 1984, Gupta et al., 1985).
Conclusions:
Deepandita Barman1 and Arunoday Das2
1Assistant Professor, Department of LPM, LCVSC, Assam Agricultural University
2Assistant Professor, Department of ARGO, LCVSC, Assam Agricultural University
