Most modern dairy herds are kept in systems that require calves to be housed individually fed milk from a bucket. Organic herds attempt to improve animal welfare by using suckling systems. The success of using a nurse cow is likely to depend on the calf’s sucking experience and the introduction procedure. The objective of this study was to learn more about the best procedure to use when introducing the calf to the nurse cow three days postpartum. The calf was either with its own mother or fed from a teat-bucket. The introduction period either lasted one or two days (where the calf and nurse cow were alone together before being introduced to a larger group of cows and calves). The results indicated that when calves were given the opportunity to suckle colostrum from their own mother, they suckled the nurse cow more often and for longer periods than calves fed from the teat bucket. The nurse cow was also licked and rubbed more by mothered calves. Less cross-suckling was observed by mothered calves compared to calves fed from a teat bucket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most modern dairy herds are kept in systems that require calves to be housed individually fed milk from a bucket. Organic herds attempt to improve animal welfare by using suckling systems. The success of using a nurse cow is likely to depend on the calf’s sucking experience and the introduction procedure. The objective of this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[928],"tags":[8882,640,70,2992,17885,23907,163,12232,45,27107,13613,7258,17354,22315,128,20911,6053,27281],"class_list":["post-5118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-welfare","tag-al","tag-animal","tag-animal-welfare","tag-animal-welfarebehaviourcalfcalf-suckling-systemcalvescattle-maternal-behaviourcowcowsgroupmilkmilk-feeding-systemsuckingsuckling-systemteatwelfare","tag-calves-at-introduction-to-nurse-cows","tag-cattle-colostrum-behaviour-licking","tag-colostrum","tag-cross-suckling","tag-dairy","tag-feeding-a-nurse-cow","tag-feeding-calves-whoe-milk","tag-milk","tag-nurse-cow-feeding-system","tag-nurse-cow-suckling-system-dairy","tag-suckling","tag-t","tag-use","tag-welfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}