Case Study: Lying behavior of dairy cows presented with different cubicle arrangements

In most freestall dairy herds cows must choose between lying in a freestall facing another cow or lying in a freestall facing a wall. In this study, we monitored lying behavior preferences of 12 lactating cows (6 primiparous and 6 multiparous) for 11 consecutive d during summertime. The 12 focal cows were in a pen with 17 additional cows and had access to 36 freestalls: 18 facing a wall (133 cm high) and 18 facing another freestall (STS; 2 rows of 9 freestalls each). The freestalls facing a wall (SFW) were the farthest from the feed bunk. The feed alley had a width of 4.6 m, and the alley between STS and SFW was 4.1 m wide. All freestalls were 130 cm wide and 237.5 cm long plus an additional 90 cm of frontal space for the cow to lunge forward while standing up. The focal cows were marked with paint, and their lying activity was video recorded during 12 d from 0800 to 2200 h. Cows lay down more in SFW in the afternoon and more in SFS in the morning. Overall, there were no differences in lying time between both freestall settings. However, cows lay in STS almost a double number of occasions than in SFW, but interestingly, lying bouts were longer in SFW than in STS. The shorter bouts in SFS compared with SFW were most likely because of the disturbance caused by an incoming cow in the opposite freestall (which could not occur in SFW). In fact, in 72% of the occasions, resting of cows on SFS was terminated when a cow entered to lie down in the freestall in front. It is concluded that once cows lie in SFW, they spend more time resting than when lying in SFS.