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Transitioning dairy cattle from parlor to automatic milking systems Heinsius, Jennifer; von Keyserlingk, Nina; Weary, Dan

Description

This paper investigated behavioral responses associated with fear when cows first experienced milking in an automatic milking system (AMS), comparing cows that had experienced two different types of training: baseline training involved being moved into an inactive AMS unit to receive a grain reward for 3 days before milking; enhanced training used a grain reward to encourage cows to enter the AMS followed for 10 days before baseline training began. All 45 cows tested, regardless of training regime, showed evidence of fear when entering the AMS for milking, and fear responses declined over multiple milkings.

Item Metadata

Title	Transitioning dairy cattle from parlor to automatic milking systems
Creator	Heinsius, Jennifer; von Keyserlingk, Nina; Weary, Dan
Contributor	Heinsius, Jennifer
Date Issued	2025-04-16
Description	This paper investigated behavioral responses associated with fear when cows first experienced milking in an automatic milking system (AMS), comparing cows that had experienced two different types of training: baseline training involved being moved into an inactive AMS unit to receive a grain reward for 3 days before milking; enhanced training used a grain reward to encourage cows to enter the AMS followed for 10 days before baseline training began. All 45 cows tested, regardless of training regime, showed evidence of fear when entering the AMS for milking, and fear responses declined over multiple milkings.
Subject	Agricultural Sciences; Positive reinforcement training; Habituation; Robotic milking; Fear Response
Type	Dataset
Date Available	2025-04-14
Provider	University of British Columbia Library
License	CC-BY 4.0
DOI	10.14288/1.0448425
URI	https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/SXQZUP
Publisher DOI	https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/SXQZUP
Rights URI	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Aggregated Source Repository	Dataverse

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CC-BY 4.0