Temperamento bovino: avaliação de agitabilidade baseada em dados de acelerômetro coletados em ambiente de contenção para manejo

Abstract

Animals’ temperament has shown great impact in beef cattle production. Animals with a more docile temperament are easier to handle, and this improves animal welfare. Deter mining the temperament of a bovine is difficult to measure. Usually, it is done subjectively by a specialist. Once the temperamental determination is carried out subjectively, it is sub ject to divergent interpretations and, as result, is difficult to improve. Therefore, there is a need for developing an objective way to determine the bovine temperament. This work proposes the development of a tool capable of capturing the movement of the trunk-scale animal set by means of an accelerometer fixed to the bottom of a trunk-scale. As it is an experimental movement monitoring tool, we opted to use the Arduino Uno because it is a flexible prototyping platform capable of completing this task. The Arduino Uno collects movement data using an accelerometer and then forwards the collected data for storage. A series of movement data is stored for each animal evaluated. From this data series, 29 hypotheses for calculating the temperament phenotype based on the collected data are proposed and calculated. Subsequently, for each phenotype, its distribution, variability and correlations will be observed, both with genetic and phenotypic values linked to tem perament, as well as the correlation with the visual assessment of a specialist. Thus, the work is intended to indicate which of the 29 proposed phenotypes, based on movement data collected by the accelerometer, best correlates with the other ways of determining temperament.