Dairy calves cross sucking

TECHNIQUES TO REDUCE NONNUTRITIVE SUCKING IN CALVES

Chantal L. Gaboury and Anne Marie de Passille, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Lennoxville, Canada.

Producers deem that calves sucking each other (cross-sucking) is undesirable and wish to control it. Following a milk-meal, calves are highly motivated to suck and will suck an artifical teat that does not deliver milk (nonnutritive sucking). Our objective was to determine whether drinking water or having hay would reduce nonnutritive sucking. Fourteen Holstein calves sucked their milk through artificial nutritive teats and we measured the amount of nonnutritive sucking following the milk-meal. Replacing the milk-covered nutritive teat with a clean, dry teat did not reduce nonnutritive sucking compared to leaving the nutritive teat in place (P=0.7). Replacing the nutritive teat by a clean teat that delivered 100 ml of water reduced the nonnutritive sucking that followed the water treatment by 59% (P<0.01). Delivering 1L of water through the milk-covered teat also reduced the ensuing nonnutritive sucking by 62% (P<0.01). However, when the time taken to drink the water was included as nonnutritive sucking, there were no differences among treatments (P=0.1). This suggests that after a milk meal, calves have a set amount of time during which they are motivated to suck and that neither the taste nor the ingestion of water reduces that time. In the second experiment, the calves were given hay immediately following the milk-meal. This reduced nonnutritive sucking by 55% compared merely distracting them by pretending to give them hay (P<0.01). Making hay available at the begining of the meal and then distracting the calf at the end of the meal reduced nonnutritive sucking by 58% (P=0.01). The motivation to eat hay competes with the motivation to suck after the meal, but the motivation to suck is too strong to be reduced by distraction. We conclude that providing water through a teat or offering hay reduces the ensuing sucking motivation, which may help in the control of cross-sucking.

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