Avoiding lameness or leg weakness in pig production is crucial to reduce cost, improve animal welfare and meat quality. Detection of lameness detection by the use of vision systems may assist the farmer or breeder to obtain a more accurate and robust measurement of lameness. The paper presents a low-cost vision system for measuring the locomotion of moving pigs based on motion detection, frame-...

Lameness, one of the most important disorders in dairy industry, is related to postpartum diseases and has an effect on cow welfare, leading changes cows' daily behavioral variables. This study quantified lameness time budget cows transition period. In total, 784 multiparous from 8 commercial Dutch farms were visually scored their locomotion (score 1–5) body condition 1–5). Each was early late ...

A University of Wisconsin-Madison lameness survey was carried out on 30 well recorded dairy herds – 15 stanchion/tie-stall and 15 free-stall, with a variety of stall bases. Each herd was visited twice – once in the spring/summer of 2000 and once in the winter of 2001. On both occasions, all milking cows were locomotion scored 1 through 4 with cows scoring 3 or 4 classified as lame. The proporti...

Measuring sow weight distribution is vital for scientists to identify lame animals before clinical signs can be visually observed and help livestock producers decrease lameness incidence in their swine breeding herd. In this study, an embedded microcomputer-based force plate system was developed to measure vertical forces produced by each limb of the sow and evaluate data accuracy to the sow's ...

There is growing interest from dairy producers in traits related to health and fitness of cattle, which often have low heritabilities but high economic values. Traits with low heritability can be improved by genetic selection, but large numbers of daughter records are required to produce predicted transmitting abilities with high reliability. Producer-recorded health event data collected from o...

A positively controlled, randomised controlled trial (RCT) was undertaken to test recovery of cows with claw horn lesions resulting in lameness of greater than two weeks duration. Cows on seven commercial farms were mobility scored fortnightly and selected by lameness severity and chronicity. Study cows all received a therapeutic trim then random allocation of: no further treatment (trim only (...

In the year 2006 about 4000 farms worldwide used over 6000 milking robots. With increased automation the time that the cattle keeper uses for monitoring animals has decreased. This has created a need for automatic health monitoring systems. Lameness is a crucial welfare and economic issue in modern dairy husbandry. It causes problems especially in loose housing of cattle. This could be greatly ...

The objective of this study was to determine the influence of weekly locomotion scoring and, thus, early detection and treatment of lame cows by a veterinarian on lameness prevalence, incidence, duration of lameness, fertility and milk yield on one dairy farm in Northern Germany. Cows were distributed to two groups. Cows in Group A (n = 99) with a locomotion score (LS) > 1 were examined and tre...