Page 166 - The Welfare of Cattle

oPtIMaL huMan anIMaL InteraCtIons 143

not transfer to being handled in the corrals. In both of these cases, the tarp and the corrals were new,
novel, and scary. This same problem can happen with extensively raised cattle that have become
accustomed to riders on horseback. The rider on horseback is perceived as familiar and safe and a
person on foot is new, novel, and frightening. The author has observed that the flight zone between
a horse and rider may be 5 ft (2 m) but it may expand to 20 ft (6 m) to 30 ft (9 m) when the animals
first see a person on foot. This can be very dangerous when the cattle are being moved into a small
pen. To get the handler out of their flight zone, the cattle may suddenly turn back and rebound out of
a pen and run over a person. It is now clear that an animal’s previous experiences will have an effect
on how it will react to handling in the future (Grandin, 1997; Grandin and Shivley, 2015).

aCCLIMate aNIMaLS tO haNDLING

Progressive ranchers take the time to acclimate young heifers to having people walk through them,
and to moving them through the corrals (Cooke, 2014; Cooke et al., 2009). It is important to use this
method on young heifers. It is less likely to be effective on older cows (Cooke, 2014). Hutson (1985)
improved the movement of sheep through a handling system by giving them rewards of a small amount
of tasty grain. During the first few passes through the handling system, the heifers should be allowed
to walk through it. All the gates should be open and backstops tied up. To keep the heifers calm, the
acclimation sessions should be limited to one per day. Doing several sessions in rapid succession can
make the animals stressed. Each time they passed through the handling facility they became increas-
ingly agitated. They had no time to calm down between the rapidly repeated acclimation sessions.
Frequent moving of beef cattle between different pastures improves the animal’s temperament
and produces calmer animal (Ceballos et al., 2016). Animal temperament can interact with
acclimation. Stock people must be careful to not frighten temperamentally reactive cattle during
acclimation. Acclimating low reactive dairy heifers to the milking facilities before freshening,
reduced flight distances and kicking during milking machine attachment. Unfortunately, high reac-
tive heifers became worse (Sutherland and Huddart, 2012). The author speculates that the poor
effects of acclimation may be partly due to the lack of feed rewards given in the milking parlor.
An earlier study showed that longer term acclimation of dairy heifers to positive interactions with
people before calving greatly reduced kicking and other agitated behavior when they first went in
the milking parlor (Bertenshaw et al., 2008).

UNDerStaNDING BehaVIOraL PrINCIPLeS

It is essential that people handling cattle understand some basic principles of animal handling.
The first principle is that calm animals are easier to handle them agitated fearful animals. Agitated
behaviors that occur during handling are usually motivated by either fear or pain. Fear is a proper
scientific word. The presence of fear circuits in the animal’s brain is well documented (Panksepp
et al., 2011). Australian researchers have studied the interactions between animals and people and
they emphasized the importance of reducing fear (Hemsworth et al., 2011).

• Signs of Fear in Cattle—Listed in order of appearance.
• Tail swishing back and forth when no flies are present (Grandin, 2017)
• Defecation
• Eye white shows (Core et al., 2014; Sandem et al., 2006)
• Rearing or agitated behavior when confined in a chute
• Handlers Should Be Quiet—Loud noise and yelling and screaming at cattle is very stressful
(Waynert et al., 1999). Lima et al. (2016) found that replacing rough cattle handling with calm, quiet
handling reduced Cortisol levels.