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ARS Home » Plains Area » Las Cruces, New Mexico » Range Management Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #270475
Title: Using time-series intervention analysis to model cow heart rate affected by programmed audio and environmental/physiological

Author
item Anderson, Dean
item REMENYI, NORBERT - Georgia Institute Of Technology
item MURRAY, LEIGH - Kansas State University

Submitted to: Applied Statistics In Agriculture Conference Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 1/13/2011
Publication Date: 5/1/2011
Citation: Anderson, D.M., Remenyi, N., Murray, L.W. 2010. Using time-series intervention analysis to model cow heart rate affected by programmed audio and environmental/physiological. 22nd Annual Conference on Applied Statistics In Agriculture Conference Proceedings. April 25-28, 2010, Manhattan, Kansas. CDROM.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: This research is the first use of the Box-Jenkins time-series models to describe changes in heart rate (HR) of free-ranging crossbred cows (Bos taurus) receiving both programmed audio cues from directional virtual fencing (DVFTM) devices and non-programmed environmental/physiological cues. The DVFTM device is designed to control the animal's location on the landscape. Polar Accurex® devices were used to capture HR every minute between 19 and 24 March 2003, when three mature free-ranging beef cows, previously habituated to the DVFTM device, were confined to a brush-infested area of an arid rangeland paddock. Global positioning system (GPS) electronics were used to record each cow's location approximately every minute while it was in a 58 ha virtual paddock (VPTM) and every second when it penetrated a virtual boundary (VBTM). The cows never escaped through the VBTM, although they penetrated it a total of 26 times in 11 different events, at which times they received programmed audio cues lasting from 1 to 56 s. Plots of these data reveal that HR spikes from programmed audio cues all fell within textbook range for cow HR (40-186 beats per minute, bpm). Heart rate spikes were analyzed using Box-Jenkins intervention analysis models, which showed that for both audio and selected environmental/physiological events, HR spikes typically returned to pre-cuing "baseline" levels in about one minute. However, the longest return-time to baseline (about four minutes) was for an environmental/physiological event of unknown origin. HR, animal location, weather and other electronic data should be measured at equally-spaced time intervals using a single time stamp to accurately associate HR changes with possible causes.