Application of Qualitative Behaviour Assessment on cows before and after their separation from their calf in a cow-calf contact system

Cow-calf contact (CCC) systems are attracting increasing interest as alternatives to early separation and offer great potential to improve animal welfare by promoting species-specific behaviours. Allowing prolonged contact is beneficial for both cow and calf by promoting growth and social competence in calves and maternal behaviors in cows. However, pair management and stress at separation may be challenging, and tackling these issues is essential to guarantee their welfare. A Qualitative Behavior Assessment (QBA) was applied to evaluate the dairy cows’ attitudes and emotions before and after separation from their calf on a commercial CCC dairy farm in northern Italy. Ten Italian Friesian cows giving birth to female calves were assessed from May to July 2024 at approximately 7 and 14 days post-partum (before (BS) and after separation (AS), respectively). Two lists of fixed terms developed in previous studies were used before (BS, 14 terms) and after separation (AS, 20 terms). Inter-observer reliability of 4 assessors was achieved through 6 online trainings before on-farm assessments that were done after joint cow observations in the two contexts. For each QBA list, scorings were submitted to a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in XLSTAT and summarized in main components PC1, PC2 and PC3. Eigenvalues were above 1.5 with 59.9% of the total variability explained for BS and above 2.3 with 50.2% of the total variability explained for AS. Before separation, PC1 summarized the terms relaxed and calm with positive loadings (≥0.67) and frightened, agitated, attentive and worried with negative loadings (≥-0.65). Active and indifferent cross-loaded on PC1 and PC2. Irritated and aggressive had negative high loadings on PC3 (≥-0.72). After separation, PC1 summarized the terms active, friendly, lively and sociable with positive loadings (≥0.68) and indifferent with a negative loading (-0.65). Calm had a positive loading (0.67) and uneasy a negative loading (-0.75) on PC2. Inquisitive loaded positively on PC3 (0.63). The results confirmed QBA as a reliable method to evaluate cows’ attitudes and emotions, however the use of two different lists for before and after separation did not allow a direct comparison of a cow’s state with and without the calf. This underlines the need for either a single list of fixed terms applicable to different contexts or for further developments of approaches to integrate and compare QBA fixed lists. Research supported by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research, PRIN 2022 Brscic - grant 2022YNENCK entitled “The Caring Dairy: promoting prolonged cow-calf contact in nature based animal production systems”.