Providing long hay in a novel pipe feeder or a bucket reduces some, but not all abnormal oral behaviors in milk-fed dairy calves

Many milk-fed dairy calves are not provided forage. In these settings, calves often perform abnormal repetitive behaviors (ARBs), including tongue rolling and nonnutritive oral manipulation (NNOM), that, based on their form, seem similar to movements used when processing feed. Feeding hay, typically presented as a short chop (≤5 cm) in a bucket, reduces ARBs. Our objective was to evaluate whether altering the presentation method of long hay (approx. 19 cm), by providing it in a bucket or a novel polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe feeder, could reduce ARBs. Holstein heifer calves were housed individually on sand and fed ad-libitum starter grain and limited milk replacer (5.7-8.4 L/d step-up) via a bottle (Control, n=9) or given access to mountaingrass hay in a bucket (Bucket, n=9) or in a PVC pipe feeder (Pipe, n=9). The 56 x 10.2 cm (length x diameter) PVC pipe feeder had four 6.4 cm-wide openings that required the calf to insert her tongue into the pipe and curl her tongue to extract hay. T..., Please see the associated manuscript for details., Supplemental material:
The supplemental materials in this section are referenced in the corresponding paper, and provide additional information and context for the experiment’s design and results. Raw data, RMarkdown files, and tables are presented as proportions, which is how the data were analyzed. RMarkdown files that produce figures convert these proportions to percentages, and the corresponding manuscript similarly converts all proportions to percentages to improve readability.
Supplemental tables and figures:
Supplemental Tables and Figures.pdf

Supplemental Table S1. Feed and ADG model outputs: Model outputs for feed (grain, hay, and TMR) intake and water intake in the preweaning and weaning periods, and average daily gain (ADG) during the preweaning period.

Supplemental Table S2. Behavior model outputs: Back-transformed model-predicted means (using type = “response” in emmeans in R), SE, and 95% CI for all oral behaviors scored, along with model outputs.

Supplemental Figure S...