Papers by Silvana Mattiello
Italian Journal of Animal Science
The present study aims to understand the influence of a reduced amount of straw litter on goats’ ... more The present study aims to understand the influence of a reduced amount of straw litter on goats’ lying comfort and hygienic characteristics of milk and straw. Lying behaviour (frequency, lying post...
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Aim of this research was to gather information on group size and habitat use by the different ung... more Aim of this research was to gather information on group size and habitat use by the different ungulate, Artiodactyla and Perissodactyla, species and spatial overlap among species. Data were collected in the dry season (OctoberNovember 2003) in a fenced area (5,021 ha) of a game ranch in Namibia during 44 game drives along five different routes. For each sighting, we recorded species, day, time, location (on a map divided into square grid units of 500-m sides), number of animals and habitat type. Duiker, Sylvicapra grimmia, was the more solitary species, followed by steenbok, Raphicerus campestris, and warthog, Phacochoerus africanus, while hartebeest, Alcelaphus buselaphus, blue wildebeest, Connochaetes taurinus, eland, Tragelaphus oryx, and mountain zebra, Equus zebra hartmannae, usually formed large groups. This is in agreement with the normal social behaviour of these species. Nevertheless, the high percentage of solitary oryx, Oryx gazella, greater kudu, Tragelaphus strepsiceros...
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Frontiers in Veterinary Science
Mastitis is the most common disease affecting dairy goats and causing economic losses. Although i... more Mastitis is the most common disease affecting dairy goats and causing economic losses. Although it is accepted that increased somatic cell count (SCC) is mainly a response to infection, its reliability for subclinical mastitis detection in goats is controversial. Indeed, many physiological and extrinsic variables can increase SCC, including breed, parity, age, stage of lactation, seasonal variations, and milking methods. In some animals, milk-secreting tissue is present in the wall of the teat and, in some instances, milk can filter through pores in the skin to the udder surface. This condition is known as “weeping teat” (WT). In these animals, mammary tissue might be prone to develop bacterial infections, although limited information is provided. Weeping teat seems to have a genetic background and is reported to be especially found in goat breeds selected for high milk production. Moreover, it is observed a genetic correlation between WT and decreased milk yield as well as increase...
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1. Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Milan, Italy, elisabetta.canali@unimi.it, mic... more 1. Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Milan, Italy, elisabetta.canali@unimi.it, michela.minero@unimi.it, silvana.mattiello@unimi.it, sara.barbieri@unimi.it, valentina.f errante@unimi.it, emanuela.dallacosta@unimi.it, monica.battini@unimi.it, francesca.dai@unimi.it 2. Neiker-Tecnalia, Arkaute Agrifood Campus, Animal Production, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain iestevez@neiker.eus 3. SRUC, Scotland’s Rural College, Edinburgh, UK, Cathy.Dwyer@sruc.ac.uk 4. Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária,Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, stilwell@fmv.ulisboa.pt 5. Department of Preventive Veterinary Medicine and Animal Health School of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science, University of São Paulo Pirassununga, Brasil, adroaldo.zanella@usp.br
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1 Animal welfare, Applied ethology and Sustainable production Lab, Department of Veterinary Medic... more 1 Animal welfare, Applied ethology and Sustainable production Lab, Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Milan, Milan, Italy E-mail: monica.battini@unimi.it; elisabetta.canali@unimi.it; michela.minero@unimi.it; silvana.mattiello@unimi.it; sara.barbieri@unimi.it; valentina.ferrante@unimi.it; emanuela.dallacosta@unimi.it. francesca.dai@unimi.it 2 Neiker-Tecnalia, Arkaute Agrifood Campus, Animal Production, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain E-mail: iestevez@neiker.eus, rruiz@neiker.eus, ibeltran@neiker.eus 3 SRUC, Scotland’s Rural College, Edinburgh, United Kingdom E-mail: cathy.dwyer@sruc.ac.uk 4 Department of Preventive Veterinary Medicine and Animal Health School of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science, University of São Paulo E-mail: Pirassununga, Brasil.adroaldo.zanella@usp.br
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Seasonal variations of some welfare indicators in dairy farms located in plain, hilly and piedmon... more Seasonal variations of some welfare indicators in dairy farms located in plain, hilly and piedmont areas in Lumbardy - One of the main priorities of the agricultural EU policies is to set up valid, reliable and feasible indicators for on-farm welfare assessment. The EU Welfare Quality® project has developed a set of valid and feasible indicators, that have also been tested for inter-observer repeatability. For those indicators, repeatability between different times of survey has already been tested, but always within limited time spans; therefore, we have no information about their long-term repeatability, e.g. in extremely different seasonal conditions. We can hypothesize that more or less marked seasonal variations can occur, depending on farms' geographical location. In order to verify this hypothesis, we collected some welfare indicators, derived from the Welfare Quality ® protocol, in 22 dairy farms located in plain, hilly and piedmont areas in Lumbardy, both in summer and ...
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... MariaVittoria Tosi, Elisabetta Canali, Silvana Mattiello Valentina Ferrante, Corrado Carenzi,... more ... MariaVittoria Tosi, Elisabetta Canali, Silvana Mattiello Valentina Ferrante, Corrado Carenzi, Marina Verga EDITO A CURA DELLA FONDAZIONE INIZIATIVE ZOOPROFILATTICHE E ZOOTECNICHE - BRESCIA Via A. Bianchi, 1 - 25124 Brescia Page 4. ...
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Mastitis is the most common disease affecting dairy goats and causing economic losses. Although i... more Mastitis is the most common disease affecting dairy goats and causing economic losses. Although it is accepted that increased somatic cell count (SCC) is mainly a response to infection, its reliability for subclinical mastitis detection in goats is controversial. Indeed, many physiological and extrinsic variables can increase SCC, including breed, parity, age, stage of lactation, seasonal variations, and milking methods. In some animals, milk-secreting tissue is present in the wall of the teat and, in some instances, milk can filter through pores in the skin to the udder surface. This condition is known as “weeping teat” (WT). In these animals, mammary tissue might be prone to develop bacterial infections, although limited information is provided. Weeping teat seems to have a genetic background and is reported to be especially found in goat breeds selected for high milk production. Moreover, it is observed a genetic correlation between WT and decreased milk yield as well as increase...
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MultiMedia Modeling
<strong>Abstract</strong> This dataset, composed of 440 sounds, conta... more <strong>Abstract</strong> This dataset, composed of 440 sounds, contains meows emitted by cats in different contexts. Specifically, 21 cats belonging to 2 breeds (Maine Coon and European Shorthair) have been repeatedly exposed to three different stimuli that were expected to induce the emission of meows: <em>Brushing</em> - Cats were brushed by their owners in their home environment for a maximum of 5 minutes; <em>Isolation in an unfamiliar environment</em> - Cats were transferred by their owners into an unfamiliar environment (e.g., a room in a different apartment or an office). Distance was minimized and the usual transportation routine was adopted so as to avoid discomfort to animals. The journey lasted less than 30 minutes and cats were allowed 30 minutes with their owners to recover from transportation, before being isolated in the unfamiliar environment, where they stayed alone for maximum 5 minutes; <em>Waiting for food</em> - The owner started the routine operations that preceded food delivery in the usual environment the cat was familiar with. Food was given at most 5 minutes after the beginning of the experiment. The dataset has been produced and employed in the context of an interdepartmental project of the University of Milan (for further information, please refer to this doi). The content of the dataset has been described in detail in a scientific work currently under review; the reference will be provided as soon as the paper is published. <strong>Naming conventions for files </strong> Files containing meows are in the <em>dataset.zip</em> archive. They are PCM streams (.wav).<br> Naming conventions follow the pattern C_NNNNN_BB_SS_OOOOO_RXX, which has to be exploded as follows: C = emission context (values: B = brushing; F = waiting for food; I: isolation in an unfamiliar environment); NNNNN = cat's unique ID; BB = breed (values: MC = Maine Coon; EU: European Shorthair); SS = sex (values: FI = female, intact; FN: female, neutered; MI: male, intact; MN: male, neutered); OOOOO = cat owner's unique ID [...]
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2020 43rd International Conference on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (TSP)
Precision livestock farming dictates the use of advanced technologies to understand, analyze, ass... more Precision livestock farming dictates the use of advanced technologies to understand, analyze, assess and finally optimize a farm’s production collectively as well as the contribution of each single animal. This Work is part of a research project wishing to steer the dairy farms’ producers to more ethical rearing systems. To study cow’s welfare, we focus on reciprocal vocalizations including mother-offspring contact calls. We show the set-up of a suitable audio capturing system composed of automated recording units and propose an algorithm to automatically detect cow vocalizations in an indoor farm setting. More specifically, the algorithm has a two-level structure: a) first, the Hilbert follower is applied to segment the raw audio signals, and b) second the detected blocks of acoustic activity are refined via a classification scheme based on hidden Markov models. After thorough evaluation, we demonstrate excellent detection results in terms of false positives, false negatives and confusion matrix.
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Animals
In this study, we investigated the lipid composition of fresh and semi-hard goat cheese produced ... more In this study, we investigated the lipid composition of fresh and semi-hard goat cheese produced in three Italian farms as well as the welfare assessment of goats reared in these farms. The fatty acid (FA) profile of cheese samples were found to be strictly related to the livestock system. Cheese collected from farms in which goats were allowed to graze and were fed diets with a higher forage/concentrate (F/C) ratio showed a FA profile represented by higher contents of health-promoting fatty acids. In the same samples, the health lipid indices showed the most favorable values. Conversely, cheese samples collected from a conventional-lowland farm, where goats were fed with higher amounts of concentrates and lower F/C ratio, presented a lower nutritional quality, characterized by the worst results for what concerns the health lipid indices. Then, we built a multivariate model able to discriminate samples coming from farms managed by a low-input system from those coming from farm manag...
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Animals
This study focuses on the problem of assessing inter-observer reliability (IOR) in the case of di... more This study focuses on the problem of assessing inter-observer reliability (IOR) in the case of dichotomous categorical animal-based welfare indicators and the presence of two observers. Based on observations obtained from Animal Welfare Indicators (AWIN) project surveys conducted on nine dairy goat farms, and using udder asymmetry as an indicator, we compared the performance of the most popular agreement indexes available in the literature: Scott’s π, Cohen’s k, kPABAK, Holsti’s H, Krippendorff’s α, Hubert’s Γ, Janson and Vegelius’ J, Bangdiwala’s B, Andrés and Marzo’s ∆, and Gwet’s γ(AC1). Confidence intervals were calculated using closed formulas of variance estimates for π, k, kPABAK, H, α, Γ, J, ∆, and γ(AC1), while the bootstrap and exact bootstrap methods were used for all the indexes. All the indexes and closed formulas of variance estimates were calculated using Microsoft Excel. The bootstrap method was performed with R software, while the exact bootstrap method was performe...
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Frontiers in Veterinary Science
The aim of this study was to test the feasibility and reliability of the Animal Welfare Indicator... more The aim of this study was to test the feasibility and reliability of the Animal Welfare Indicators (AWIN) protocol for welfare assessment of dairy goats when applied to semi-extensive farming conditions. We recruited 13 farms located in the NW Italian Alps where three assessors individually and independently applied a modified version of the AWIN welfare assessment protocol for goats integrated with some indicators derived from the AWIN welfare assessment protocol for sheep. The applied protocol consisted of nine individual-level (body condition score, hair coat condition, abscesses, overgrown claws, udder asymmetry, fecal soiling, nasal discharge, ocular discharge, and improper disbudding) and seven group-level (severe lameness, Qualitative Behavior Assessment-QBA, thermal stress, oblivion, Familiar Human Approach Test-FHAT, synchrony at grazing, synchrony at resting) animal-based indicators. On most farms, the level of welfare was good. Many of the considered welfare problems (ove...
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Papers by Silvana Mattiello