Ruminating, Eating, and Locomotion Behavior Registered by Innovative Technologies around Calving in Dairy Cows

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The use of technology to predict calving is increasingly being applied in animal reproduction. In our current study, we tested the hypothesis that there are correlations between facets of ruminating, eating, and locomotion behavior parameters registered by innovative technologies utilized by RumiWatch before and after calving. We found that rumination time, eating time, drinking time, and activity all decreased ten days before calving; drinking gulps decreased on the ninth and second days before calving; and down time decreased two days before calving, thus ensuring that the likelihood of calving is predicted from 10 days prior to the event. ABSTRACT: The hypothesis for this study was that there are correlations between ruminating, eating, and locomotion behavior parameters registered by the RumiWatch sensors (RWS) before and after calving. The aim was to identify correlations between registered indicators, namely, rumination, eating, and locomotion behavior around the calving period. Some 54 multiparous cows were chosen from the entire herd without previous calving or other health problems. The RWS system recorded a variety of parameters such as rumination time, eating time, drinking time, drinking gulps, bolus, chews per minute, chews per bolus, activity up and down time, temp average, temp minimum, temp maximum, activity change, other chews, ruminate chews, and eating chews. The RWS sensors were placed on the cattle one month before expected calving based on service data and removed ten days after calving. Data were registered 10 days before and 10 days after calving. We found that using the RumiWatch system, rumination time was not the predictor of calving outlined in the literature; rather, drinking time, downtime, and rumen chews gave the most clearcut correlation with the calving period. We suggest that using RumiWatch to combine rumination time, eating time, drinking, activity, and down time characteristics from ten days before calving, it would be possible to construct a sensitive calving alarm; however, considerably more data are needed, not least from primiparous cows not examined here.