| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 動物科學技術學研究所 === 107 === The transition period is defined as three weeks before and three weeks after calving. In this period dairy cattles face a series of difficult events, including fetal rapid growth, stress of parturition, preparation of lactation peak, negative energy balance, metabolic diseases prompt period, and uterine and ovary recovery. This period is more difficult for primiparous cows, because they must cope with an extra nutrition demand for growth, and lack of experience which leads them more likely to suffer from metabolic diseases, reduced milk yield, reproductive disorder and even being culled in this period.
The purpose of this study is twofold. One was to utilize new transition period feeding management protocol to ensure them safely passing through the transition period. The second purpose of the study was to monitor the health of the experimental cows by the automatic electronic behavior detection system and find specific behavior pattern before metabolic diseases occurring for future application in the field. The results confirmed that the new feeding management protocol could prolong the feeding time of the primiparous cows before calving, also reduce ketone bodies, increase the rumination time and increase the milk protein ratio of multiparous cows after calving.
We found that the rumination time of multiparous cows in the control group was significantly lower than that in the treatment group, and reflected in the higher blood BHBA concentration and milk somatic cell counts. Confirm that changes in behavior can be used as a basis for monitoring cows’ health status. In addition, this experiment screened out the experimental cows with retained placenta after calving, and found that their pre-partum rumination time was significantly lower than the healthy experimental cows, which indicated that the change of pre- partum behavior can be used as an early detection indicator of postpartum metabolic diseases. In conclusion, the new transition period feeding management protocol used in this study has a positive improvement for effect both primiparous and multiparous cows. In terms of primiparous cows, extending the separate grouping time may be able to make the improvement more obvious. Behavior change of dairy cows has the potential to be used to monitor the health status of dairy cows and as pre-partum disease indicator. In the future, early warnings can be sent to farm managers so that they can make precise prevention action to reduce the incidence of post-partum metabolic diseases, improve the efficiency of pre-partum feeding management, reduce the culling rate of dairy cows during the transition period, and extend the production life of dairy cows.
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