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Estimating meal criteria for meal pattern analysis of dairy cows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2017

B J Tolkamp
Affiliation:
Animal Biology Division, Scottish Agricultural College, and BioSS*, The King's Buildings, Edinburgh EH9 3JG, UK
D J Allcroft
Affiliation:
Animal Biology Division, Scottish Agricultural College, and BioSS*, The King's Buildings, Edinburgh EH9 3JG, UK
I Kyriazakis
Affiliation:
Animal Biology Division, Scottish Agricultural College, and BioSS*, The King's Buildings, Edinburgh EH9 3JG, UK
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Extract

Meal pattern analyses depend crucially on appropriate estimates of bout or meal criteria (i.e., the longest non-feeding intervals accepted as part of a meal). Bout criteria are frequently estimated after fitting a ‘broken-stick’ to the un-transformed, the log-transformed, or the log-transformed cumulative (log-survivorship), frequency distribution of between-feeding interval length. We know of no biological justification for fitting a broken stick to the frequency distribution of short intervals between feeding events and can, therefore, not interpret ‘criteria’ obtained that way. The methods that fit a broken-stick to log-survivorship or log-frequency curves are based on the implicit assumption that the probability of an animal initiating a bout is independent of the time since the last bout. Only then will the length of intervals between bouts be distributed as a negative exponential that appears as a straight line after log-transformation. However, the satiety concept predicts that this probability is not constant but increases with time since the last meal.

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Copyright
Copyright © The British Society of Animal Science 1999

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References

Tolkamp, B.J., Allcroft, D.J., Austin, E.J., Nielsen, B.L. & Kyriazakis, I. 1998. Satiety splits feeding behaviour into bouts. Journal of Theoretical Biology 194: 235250.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed