Economic values for calving performance in first and later parities were estimated for the Piemontese cattle. Calving performance is a threshold trait usually recorded using a scoring system with categories corresponding to the rate of difficulty. In the Piemontese breed five categories were adopted (from unassisted to foetotomy). A normal underlying distribution with thresholds corresponding t...

Birth weight (BWT) and calving difficulty (CD) were recorded on 4,579 first-parity females from the Germplasm Evaluation Program at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center (USMARC). Both traits were analyzed using a bivariate animal model with direct and maternal effects. Calving difficulty was transformed from the USMARC scores to corresponding -scores from the standard normal distribution based ...

Calving traits for frequently used dairy breeds and crossbreeds were investigated using calving records collected in Australia over a period of 18 years. Dystocia (calving difficulty) was highest for heifers calving to Holstein-Friesian bulls, and Jersey calves caused the least dystocia. Incidence of dystocia in Holsteins was influenced by the season (gestation lengths were longer in winter, re...

The objective of this study was to characterize breeds representing diverse biological types for birth and weaning traits in crossbred cattle. Gestation length, calving difficulty, percentage of unassisted calving, percentage of perinatal survival, percentage of survival from birth to weaning, birth weight, BW at 200 d, and ADG were measured in 2,500 calves born and 2,395 calves weaned. Calves ...

Difficult calving may adversely affect dairy cow health and performance. Maternal:fetal disproportion is a major cause of dystocia. Therefore, the main objective this study was to assess effects dam:calf body weight ratio (D:C) on difficulty, rumination time, lying inflammatory profile in 25 Holstein cows. Using automatic monitoring systems, we monitored behavior production 9 primiparous 16 plu...

A 3-yr study was conducted with spring-born heifers (n = 240) to determine the effects of developing heifers to either 55 or 60% of mature BW at breeding on reproduction and calf production responses. A concurrent study was also conducted with summer-born heifers (n = 146) to examine effects of breeding heifers with the mature cow herd or 1 mo earlier on reproduction and calf production variabl...

This experiment was conducted to evaluate the association between risk factors and the risk of culling in Iranian Holstein cows. The data consisted of 329,772 lactation records obtained from the Animal Breeding Center of Iran (2003 - 2012) and logistic regression was applied to investigate the associations between the predictor and response variables. The response variable in this experiment wa...