Associations between rearing conditions and the risk of culling in dairy cows were studied by survival analysis. Data were collected from 1039 Swedish Red cows, 1029 Swedish Holsteins, and 56 cows of other milk or cross-breeds, representing all female animals born in 109 Swedish herds during 1998. Length of productive life was defined as the number of days from 1st calving to culling. The appli...

BACKGROUND The aims of this study were to establish the incidence of cystic ovarian disease (COD) and its geographical and seasonal variation in Norway, investigate the effect of COD on culling rates, and describe the effects of COD on subsequent reproductive performance and its association to twins. METHODS Diagnosis of COD was made by veterinary surgeons in the field. Four statistical model...

In this paper we propose a framework for the visualization of urban environments In this context we also propose a novel tight conservative occlusion culling algorithm which brings a solution to the partial occlusion problem A conservative visibility culling algorithm accepts an object as completely visible even only a small portion of it is unoccluded In our algorithm we tried to avoid this by...

Preparing for and responding to outbreaks of serious livestock infectious diseases are critical measures to safeguard animal health, public health, and food supply. Almost all of the current control strategies are empirical, and mass culling or "stamping out" is frequently the principal strategy for controlling epidemics. However, there are ethical, ecological, and economic reasons to consider ...

An observational study was carried out, using data collected from four areas in the Irish midlands, between 1989 and 2004, to critically evaluate the long-term effects of proactive badger culling and to provide insights into reactive badger culling tuberculosis (TB) prevalence in cattle. Confirmed cattle herd TB incidence is the outcome measure used throughout. Relative to reactive culling, pro...

The objectives of this study were to determine the effects of parity on milk production, body condition change, periparturient health, and culling in Korean dairy herds. The data utilized included; milk yield, body condition score, cow parity, calving condition, periparturient disorders, culling, and reproductive status, which were recorded from 1290 calvings in eight dairy herds. The mean milk...

First lactation clinical mastitis records for Norwegian cattle from 1978 onwards were analysed. Variance components for clinical mastitis were estimated with a linear sire model using records of more than 500,000 daughters of 2043 sires. Heritability increased slightly as the period for sampling health data increased, and the longest period analysed (from 15 2 days before calving to 210 days af...

Bovine tuberculosis (TB) is a zoonotic disease that can have serious consequences for cattle farming and, potentially, for public health. In Britain, failure to control bovine TB has been linked to persistent infection of European badger (Meles meles) populations. However, culling of badgers in the vicinity of recent TB outbreaks in cattle has failed to reduce the overall incidence of cattle TB...

This paper presents an efficient approach for integrating occlusion culling and hardware instancing. The work is primarily targeted at Building Information Models (BIM), which typically share characteristics addressed by these two acceleration techniques separately – high level of occlusion and frequent reuse of building components. Together, these two acceleration techniques complement each ot...