Postpartum Cows

Introduction As is common in other livestock species, social organization of cattle relies on relationships of dominance throughout the herd. Dominance in a herd is attributed to several factors including animal age, body weight, body size and/or height, presence of horns, territoriality breed (if in a multi-breed herd) and physiological state (i.e. pre- or postpartum/ lactating). Social organization of herd dominant and subordinate animals have been observed as a major factor effecting several aspects of animal production such as feed intake, feeding behavior (Gibbons et al., 2009), grazing activity (Mosley, 1999), weight gain, milk yield, expression of estrus (Hurnick et al., 1975) and individual bull performance (Carpenter et al., 1990). Although there is limited information availability on the magnitude by which social organization as a stressor effects postpartum weight variation, this weight difference between postpartum females has been shown to be highly influential on reproductive performance and production parameters of cow-calf pairs. The hypothesis was dominate postpartum cows gain more weight than subordinate postpartum cows in confinement and a subsequent increase in calf weight of dominate cows compared to weight gain in calves from subordinate. To test this hypothesis, objectives for the study include 1) evaluation of social …show more content…
However, the study failed to relate the social stresses of dominance order on cow reproductive performance with a slight mention of the advantages of weight gain to reproductive performance of cows. As a nutrition/feeding exercise this study is also lacking and was acknowledged in that no effort was made to evaluate feed intake per animal as it relates to dominance. A table of antagonistic and agonistic event counts would have been helpful as well to show the differences in dominate vs. subordinate females and the behaviors associated with each