Designing Better Environments for Dairy Cattle to Rest

摘要

To maintain good health and welfare and high levels of productivity, it is essential that dairy cows have enough time to lie down and rest. Good design of the lying areas for dairy cows is important to ensure that they have adequate rest. An increasedrisk of lameness can result from poorly designed stalls that lead cows to spend more time on standing on wet concrete. There have been many studies looking at how much time dairy cows spend lying down and these results are summarised in Table 1. Averagelying times ranged between 9.4 and 14.7 h per 24 h across experiments. However, when given comfortable places to lie down, lactating cows tend to lay down for at least 12 h a day. Dairy cows divide this time into an average of 8.2-14.1 lying bouts per day, with average bout duration ranging from 0.9 to 1.4 h.