Repeatability and predictability of lying and feeding behaviours in dairy cattle

Abstract

Subtle changes in behaviour, which may be useful as early indicators of disease or stress in farm animals, can be detected using precision livestock technologies. However, as animals often display differences in their baseline behaviours from one another, individual variation needs to be measured and accounted for if we want to successfully detect abnormalities. In addition to consistent individual differences in their mean behaviour, which are called behavioural types and measured by repeatability, animals may differ in the amount of day-to-day variation around their own mean. This is known as predictability and it is very rarely measured in animals as it requires data with high granularity for extended periods of time, which is hard to obtain without precision technologies. Here we aim to quantify the repeatability and predictability of lying and feeding, two behaviours which have been investigated as potential indicators of disease with inconsistent results, in dairy cows. We used data on daily lying behaviours from leg-mounted sensors for 1439 cows and data on daily feeding behaviours from neck-mounted sensors for 2584 cows belonging to multiple herds to quantify the variation between individuals, the individual differences in predictability and any correlations between individual behaviour type and predictability of the same behaviour. Using multivariate double hierarchical generalised linear models, we were able to quantify individual variation in feeding and lying behaviours of adult cows for the first time. Consistent variation between individuals was present for all measures of lying and feeding with repeatability values of 0.38 for daily feeding time and 0.34 for daily lying time. Individuals also varied in their levels of predictability with coefficients of 0.46 and 0.29 for the daily lying and feeding time respectively. Lastly, there were significant positive correlations between several behaviours and the amount of residual intra-individual variation for the same behaviour (mean lying bout length: 0.93, mean feeding bout length: 0.88), indicating that cows with the longest bouts of the two behaviours were also more variable and unpredictable, perhaps due to an opportunistic strategy. These results highlight the importance of measuring individual variation in behaviour, supporting the evidence of personality traits in cattle, as well as differences in predictability, which must be taken into account in any use of behavioural indicators for early disease diagnosis.