National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS)
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PRINT ISSN : 2319-7692
Online ISSN : 2319-7706 Issues : 12 per year Publisher : Excellent Publishers Email : editorijcmas@gmail.com / submit@ijcmas.com Editor-in-chief: Dr.M.Prakash Index Copernicus ICV 2018: 95.39 NAAS RATING 2020: 5.38 |
Standard practice in the dairy industry is to separate the calf and dam immediately after birth and raise calves in individual pens during the milk-feeding period. But this practice is disputed because of animal welfare concerns. The weaned calves are often offered colostrums/milk in buckets, teat bucket or bottles which does not always satisfy the calf’s motivation to suckle. Social isolation early in life impair cognition aspects. Cognition is the mental process of knowing through perception or reasoning. Negative effects of social deprivation early in life also have been shown in adulthood, which include impaired maternal care, increased aggression, and impaired social recognition. Social deprivation can influence neural development and brain function as well as behavior. Dairy cattle, are often exposed to novel events, such as changes in diet, changes in pen location, regrouping with new social partners, and new milking procedures. Therefore cognitive abilities e.g. learning and retention abilities by animals makes it easier to train the animals to use new devices and reallocation of preferred areas to rest, recognition of stock people by dairy animals helps in decrease of animal’s fear of stock people, greater ease of handling and less negative interference in the production. Cattle are naturally social and show signs of fear and distress when separated from their companions. Individually housed calves exhibit more non-nutritive behavior than do paired or group-housed calves are slower to start feeding when introduced into a new pen and therefore gain less weight in the days after grouping. So, social experience early in life of calf can have profound effects on affective and cognitive development, ultimately affecting calf welfare and growth as well as calf responses to novel events.
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