172 research outputs found
Public attitudes towards different management scenarios for ‘surplus’ dairy calves
No full textAs awareness grows, some traditional management practices used by the dairy industry will be questioned by members of the public. Therefore, to maintain its social license to operate, the industry needs to account for public perspectives when developing future directions. Our aims were to assess attitudes of members of the public toward the management of surplus calves not needed for milk production on dairy farms, and to assess how specific calf management practices might influence these attitudes. A mixed-methods questionnaire was developed and distributed online in the United States and in Canada. After reading an introductory paragraph stating that surplus calves are generally used for meat production, participants were randomly allocated into groups and read 1 of 4 scenarios that described different surplus calf management practices in more detail. The scenarios followed a 2 × 2 factorial design, and the factors that differed were the calf's age at slaughter (≤2 wk vs. ≥12 mo), and whether the calf was separated from the cow at birth or sometime later. Data representative of key census demographics from 998 participants were analyzed. Quantitative data analysis included descriptive statistics, nonparametric tests, generalized partial credit models, and linear regression models. For qualitative data, we used reliability thematic analysis. Overall, participants were slightly positive in their attitudes toward the introductory paragraph, and participants in the groups in which the calf was slaughtered after 12 mo of age often specifically linked their acceptance of the practice to the fact that the calves' lives had a purpose (i.e., contributing meaningfully to the beef supply). In contrast, only 3% of the participants regarded a slaughter age of <1 mo as appropriate. Participants in the groups in which calves were slaughtered within 2 wk after birth had more negative attitudes, and these attitudes declined even further when the calf was separated from the cow soon after birth. Besides the 2 main factors (age at slaughter and cow-calf separation), information on pasture access, the healthiness of the meat from the calves, and the exact age of slaughter were also considered important by participants to make a more informed decision about their view on surplus calf management. Overall, our results indicate that failure by the dairy industry to provide assurances that excess dairy calves have a reasonable length of life and that this life has purpose (i.e., contributes to the beef supply chain) places the industry at odds with public values. Also, as awareness grows, the practice of early cow-calf separation will be increasingly questioned by the public; failure to begin discussions on this topic will increase the risk that future decisions about this topic will be made in the absence of the farmer.Hans Sigrist Research Prize (Hans Sigrist Foundation, Bern, Switzerland
Right projective semigroups with 0
No full textAbstractWe describe the semigroups S with 0 that are projective in the category of right S-objects, i.e. of centered right S-operands. Among them are the free semigroups with an adjoined zero, and several characterizations of this subclass are given. Two other classes, one of them close to free semigroups with 0, the other rather far apart, are discussed in detail. The first class consists of semigroups of finite and infinite sequences, with multiplication based on concatenation. The second is formed by the projectives in the category of (S,S)-biobjects
Microarray based study on virulence-associated genes and resistance determinants of Staphylococcus aureus isolates from cattle
No full textStaphylococcus aureus is a common pathogen which can colonise and infect not only man, but also domestic animals. Especially, infection of cattle is of high economic relevance as S. aureus is an important causal agent of bovine mastitis. In the present contribution, a DNA microarray was applied for the study of 144 different gene targets, including resistance genes and genes encoding exotoxins, in S. aureus isolated from cows. One hundred and twenty-eight isolates from Germany and Switzerland were tested. These isolates were assigned to 20 different strains and nine clonal complexes. The majority of isolates belonged either to apparently closely related clonal complexes 8, 25, and 97 (together 34.4%) or were related to the sequenced bovine strain RF122 (48.4%). Notable characteristics of S. aureus of bovine origin are the carriage of intact haemolysin beta (in 82% of isolates tested), the absence of staphylokinase (in 89.1%), the presence of allelic variants of several exotoxins such as toxic shock syndrome toxin and enterotoxin N, and the occurrence of the leukocidin lukF-P83/lukM (in 53.1%). Two isolates were methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). One of them was a clonal complex 8 MRSA related to the epidemic MRSA strain Irish 01. The other one belonged to ST398/spa-type 34 resembling a newly emerging MRSA strain which has been described to occur in humans as well as in domestic animals. The presence of these two strains highlights the possibility of transfers of S. aureus strains between different host species
The kinetic temperature of Barnard 68
No full textWe have observed
the nearby isolated globule Barnard 68 (B68) in the and
inversion lines of ammonia. The gas kinetic temperature derived
from these is
T=10\pm1.2~\ensuremath{{\rm K}}. The observed line-widths are almost
thermal: \ensuremath{\Delta V}=0.181\pm0.003~\ensuremath{{\rm km\,s^{-1}}}
(\ensuremath{\Delta V_{\rm therm}}=
0.164\pm0.010~\ensuremath{{\rm km\,s^{-1}}}),
supporting the earlier hypothesis that B68 is in hydrostatic
equilibrium.
The kinetic temperature is an input
parameter to the physical cloud model put forward recently, and we
discuss the impact of the new value in this context
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