Over the last five years, I have found myself circling around four key concepts: Performance. Philosophy. Animals. And Equality. And I have found myself thinking in and with circles. It began with the various references to circles we can find in the philosophy of Henri Bergson - in his idea of the field …

Farmers often install automatic cow brushes to promote grooming behaviour, potentially reducing stress. Health problems in cattle are typically accompanied by a suit of sickness behaviours and a reduction of low resilience behaviours such as grooming. Thus, decreased automatic brush use could be a potential …

In the European Union, cattle registration has been harmonised, and every farmer has to report cattle deaths to a national computer database. However, there is no obligation to mention the reason for culling, death or slaughter. In dairy farming, the herd is constantly renewed by letting in some young …

Social dominance in cattle is important when resources are scarce and competitive situations occur such as in a queue in front of an automated milking system (AMS). We aimed to 1) create and validate an algorithm to automatically register waiting time in front of an AMS (WT_AMS) for individual cows and …

Several studies have suggested that precision livestock farming (PLF) is a useful tool foranimal welfare management and assessment. Location, posture and movement of an individual are key elements in identifying the animal and recording its behaviour. Currently, multiple technologies are available for …

A focus of information on production systems calls for more knowledge on the naturalness in behaviour of semi wild living cattle. Broadening this knowledge database is beneficial to the increased use of cattle in conservation as well as more traditional farming methods. This study therefore investigated …

'Koe en boer on tour' is een rapportage van het onderzoek dat is gedaan in het kader van het realiseren van een bredere uitrol van het door Wageningen UR Livestock Research ontwikkelde innovatieprogramma Kracht van Koeien.

In de media verschijnen met regelmaat berichten over brand in veestallen waarbij vele dieren omkomen. De mediaberichten gaven echter vaak onvoldoende of onbetrouwbare informatie voor een goede beschrijving van de stalbrandenproblematiek. Dit onderzoeksrapport geeft meer inzicht in de omvang, ernst en …