• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.388-394
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• 2020

This study was undertaken to evaluate and compare the status of animal welfare, environmental level, and sow behavior, by including two farmhouses with sow group housing but having different floor types, viz., litter floor and slat floor. Animal welfare level was evaluated for body and vulval wounds of sows. The environmental level was measured for a total of 4 months, assessing the concentrations of H2S, NH3 and CO2 inside the pig house, once a month. Results of this study indicate that the level of animal welfare, with respect to body and vulval wounds, was better in the concrete slat floor farmhouse (H) than in the litter floor farmhouse (K). Environmental levels obtained (in ppm) were: H2S (H, 1.0; K, 0.0), NH3 (H, 45.4; K, 1.3), and CO2 (H, 1102.3; K, 258.8), indicating higher levels in the H than in K farmhouse. Aggressive behavior was mainly encountered in the H farmhouse. These results indicate that the same group housing system, but with different flooring, results in changes pertaining to aggressive behavior and environmental levels. It is therefore necessary to study the behavior changes, welfare, and environmental levels while deliberating different floor types.

• Journal of Animal Science and Technology
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.1453-1463
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• 2021

Feeding is the most important behavior that represents the health and welfare of weanling pigs. The early detection of feed refusal is crucial for the control of disease in the initial stages and the detection of empty feeders for adding feed in a timely manner. This paper proposes a real-time technique for the detection and recognition of small pigs using a deep-leaning-based method. The proposed model focuses on detecting pigs on a feeder in a feeding position. Conventional methods detect pigs and then classify them into different behavior gestures. In contrast, in the proposed method, these two tasks are combined into a single process to detect only feeding behavior to increase the speed of detection. Considering the significant differences between pig behaviors at different sizes, adaptive adjustments are introduced into a you-only-look-once (YOLO) model, including an angle optimization strategy between the head and body for detecting a head in a feeder. According to experimental results, this method can detect the feeding behavior of pigs and screen non-feeding positions with 95.66%, 94.22%, and 96.56% average precision (AP) at an intersection over union (IoU) threshold of 0.5 for YOLOv3, YOLOv4, and an additional layer and with the proposed activation function, respectively. Drinking behavior was detected with 86.86%, 89.16%, and 86.41% AP at a 0.5 IoU threshold for YOLOv3, YOLOv4, and the proposed activation function, respectively. In terms of detection and classification, the results of our study demonstrate that the proposed method yields higher precision and recall compared to conventional methods.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.32 no.8
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• pp.1211-1218
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• 2019

Objective: The objective of this study was to determine the effects of age and gender (bull vs steer) on feeding behavior parameters in young beef cattle fed grass silage. Methods: The study was conducted on 180 young beef cattle at 7 to 18 mo of age. The experimental materials comprised 90 bulls produced by commercial crossing of Polish Holstein-Friesian cows with Charolais, Limousin and Hereford bulls (30 animals of each breed) and 90 steers of the same genotypes. The animals had ad libitum access to grass silage; the concentrate was fed separately, in feed stations. They received 28 g dry matter of concentrate per kg of metabolic body weight per day. Bunk visit data and silage intake for all experimental animals were recorded individually using the Roughage Intake Control system (5 feed bunks per 15 animals). Results: Age and gender (bull vs steer) exerted significant effects on the feeding behavior of young beef cattle. The frequency of bunk visits and meal frequency decreased, whereas the feeding rate of silage, and the average duration and size of a single meal increased with age (p<0.01). Bunk attendance and meal frequency were higher (p<0.01) in steers than in bulls (49.1 vs 37.4 visits/d, and 8.63 vs 7.99 meals/d, respectively). Daily feeding time was longer in steers than in bulls (102.3 vs 100.3 min/d, respectively), but the feeding rate of silage was lower in steers, and their meals were smaller in size and shorter in duration (p<0.01). Daily silage dry matter intake was higher (p<0.01) in bulls than in steers (4.62 vs 4.47 kg/d, respectively). Conclusion: The results of this study indicate that age and gender (bull vs steer) exerted significant effects on the feeding behavior of young beef cattle.

• Journal of Animal Science and Technology
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• v.65 no.2
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• pp.441-458
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• 2023

The poultry industry, which produces excellent sources of protein, suffers enormous economic damage from diseases. To solve this problem, research is being conducted on the early detection of infection according to the behavioral characteristics of poultry. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential of a non-movement behavior observation method to detect sick chickens. Forty 1-day-old Ross 308 males were used in the experiments, and an isolator equipped with an Internet Protocol (IP) camera was fabricated for observation. The chickens were inoculated with Salmonella enterica serovar Gallinarum A18-GCVP-014, the causative agent of fowl typhoid (FT), at 14 days of age, which is a vulnerable period for FT infection. The chickens were continuously observed with an IP camera for 2 weeks after inoculation, chickens that did not move for more than 30 minutes were detected and marked according to the algorithm. FT infection was confirmed based on clinical symptoms, analysis of cardiac, spleen and liver lesion scores, pathogen re-isolation, and serological analysis. As a result, clinical symptoms were first observed four days after inoculation, and dead chickens were observed on day six. Eleven days after inoculation, the number of clinical symptoms gradually decreased, indicating a state of recovery. For lesion scores, dead chickens scored 3.57 and live chickens scored 2.38. Pathogens were re-isolated in 37 out of 40 chickens, and hemagglutination test was positive in seven out of 26 chickens. The IP camera applied with the algorithm detected about 83% of the chickens that died in advance through non-movement behavior observation. Therefore, observation of non-movement behavior is one of the ways to detect infected chickens in advance, and it appears to have potential for the development of remote broiler management system.

• Journal of Animal Environmental Science
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.133-140
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• 2013

The aim of this study was to investigate the behavioral changes of laying hens in an aviary system. In this study, 500 laying hens (Hyline brown) were held in an aviary system in a open-type poultry house. The behaviors of laying hens were recorded using CCD cameras and a digital video recorder. The data were scanned every 2 min to obtain an instantaneous behavioral sample. In the behaviors of laying hens, 'Feeding' and 'Drinking' increased from 3 d placing chick and stabilized after 5 d placing chick. 'Perching' increased from 19:00 to 05:00, while 'Nest visiting' increased from 06:00 to 18:00. 'Aggressive behavior' decreased gradually after 5 d placing chick. These results suggest that the behaviors of laying hens are changed rapidly for about 5 days after placing chick and the behaviors of the laying hens are almost stabilized at 5 d placing chick.

• Animal Bioscience
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• v.34 no.11
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• pp.1870-1878
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• 2021

Objective: The objective of this experiment was to investigate the effects of different colors produced by light emitting diode (LED) on Brown Tsaiya ducks. Methods: A total of 144 female Brown Tsaiya ducks were randomly allocated into three individual cage rearing chambers with different LED illumination colors as treatments. Three different treatments were: i) white color, ii) blue color, and iii) red color. The experiment periods were from ducks 21 to 49 weeks of age, determined traits included i) egg laying performance, ii) feed intake, iii) egg shell breaking strength, iv) egg shell thickness, v) egg Haugh unit, vi) egg weight, vii) serum Estradiol and Progesterone concentration, and viii) behavior pattern. Results: The results indicated that when compared with white and blue color, red color could stimulate ducks sexual maturation and raised the egg laying performance. The red light group was also observed to have the highest feed intake among three treatments. The blue treatment had the lowest egg shell breaking strength and the highest egg weight among three treatments, nevertheless, no significant difference was observed among three treatments on egg shell thickness and egg Haugh unit. The red light group had higher serum estradiol concentration than the white and blue groups, but no significant difference among treatments on the serum Progesterone concentration was found. The results of behavior pattern indicated that red light group showed more feeding and less resting behavior compared to the blue light group. Conclusion: We found a potential of applying red light illumination in the indoor laying duck raising system with positive results on egg laying performance and acceptable egg weight, equivalent egg qualities compared to white and blue light.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.296-301
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• 2023

This study was conducted to induce muscle loss using dexametasone and then use the extract to determine its effectiveness in a muscle loss animal model. Animal experimental groups were divided by five groups. Changes in the weight of the animals were measured for a total of 5 weeks. After animal sacrifice, muscle mass was measured, and animal behavior evaluation was conducted using grip strength test and pole test. The expression levels of MAFbx protein was measured using muscle samples. Oral administration of Fomes fomentarius extract was effective in suppressing muscle atropy and increasing muscle, which was confirmed through animal behavior evaluation and muscle-related protein expression.

• Journal of Animal Environmental Science
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.139-148
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• 1999

This study was conducted to develop an image processing system which can classify the pig's thermoregulatory behavior under the different environmental conditions. The 4 pigs of 25kg were housed in the environmentally controlled chamber(1.4m$\times$2.2m floor space). Postural behavior of the pigs was captured with an CCD color camera. The raw behavioral images were processed by thresholoding, reduction, separation of slightly contacted pigs, labeling, noise removal, computation of number of labels, and classification of the pig's behavior. The correct classification rate of the image processing system was 97.8%(88 out of 90 testing images). The results of this study showed that the image processing system could be used for a behavior-based automatic environmental controller.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.1038-1043
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• 2015

In this study, we investigated the effects of mixing on the aggressive behavior of commercially housed pigs. The behavioral patterns of 36 groups of pigs (a total of 360 animals) were observed over 3 consecutive days directly after weaning ($25{\pm}1.2$ days of age), and 25 and 50 days later with the aid of video technology. Fight latency and total duration and frequency of fighting were significantly different among the age groups. The aggressive behaviors decreased in 75-day old pigs if compared to 25- and 50-day old animals. Moreover, dominance index (DI) was higher in 25-day old and lower in 75-day old pigs. A comparison of dominant (DI>0) and submissive (DI<0) pigs showed significant differences (p<0.05) for major aggressive behaviors in all age groups. Dominant pigs were involved in more aggressive interactions, had longer fights, and initiated more fights than submissive pigs. Post-mixing aggressive behavior was altered by previous experience of mixing. Aggressive behavior and DI are suitable methods for analyzing the effects of mixing on commercially housed growing pigs.

• Korean Journal of Acupuncture
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.75-99
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• 2021

Objectives : The purpose of this study is to analyze animal behavioral changes and related neurobiological mechanisms in recent studies using animal models with pain and depression. Methods : We conducted database search in Pubmed, NDSL, and EMBASE up to January 2021. Included studies were classified as depression-like behavior observed in pain model, pain-like behavior observed in depression model, and pain and depression comorbidity model. The results of pain- and depression-like behaviors, the changes of neurobiological mechanisms, and the treatment methods such as drugs, natural substance-derived chemicals, or acupuncture were analyzed. Results : We included 124 studies (81 studies in depression-like behavior observed in pain model, 19 studies in pain-like behavior observed in depression model, and 24 studies in pain and depression comorbidity model). Pain and depression comorbidity animal models were induced using various methods by drugs or surgery. Von frey test, a method for evaluating mechanical allodynia was the most commonly used for measuring pain-like behavior and the forced swimming test was the most commonly used for measuring depression-likes behavior. The changes of neurobiological factors, such as decrease of 5-hydroxytryptamine and increase of oxidative stress and pro-inflammation cytokines were generally changed in the frontal cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, and spinal cord in all types of models. For treating pain and depression-like behaviors, various types of drugs such as antidepressant, tranquilizer, analgesic, and natural substance-derived chemicals were used. Acupuncture treatment was used in 4 studies. Conclusions : In the future, more diverse studies on the combined model of pain and depression need to be conducted. In addition, it is necessary to establish a mechanistic basis for the development of various treatments by identifying the common mechanisms of pain and depression.