Standing orientation and behaviour of goats during short-haul road transportation

A field study was conducted to observe the standing orientation and behavio ur among a group of meat type goats during transit by road. Randomly select ed goats were observed from 10 runs (10 goats per run) carried out on the s ame road and the duration of each run was about 50 min. Two observers stood on the deck of the truck and each noted the ongoing activities of five ani mals. The most frequent standing orientation adopted by goats was parallel to the truck's direction of travel (24.7 +/- 2.1 min) followed by diagonal orientation (11.9 +/- 1.6 min) and perpendicular orientation (9.1 +/- 1.4 m in) during the 50 min road journey. The goats were not observed to orient t hemselves opposite to the truck's direction of travel. Although, the animal s changed their orientation frequently, apparently to maintain balance, the re was a clear bias against the perpendicular and diagonal orientations. Me an frequencies for the various behaviours were: bleating (1.3), jumping (0. 7), pushing (0.9), fighting (0.7), falling (3.1), urination (0.5), defecati on (0.3) and rumination (0.1). Jumping and bleating mostly occurred at the start of the journey. Virtually all failings were associated with the driver's changing speed of vehicle by braking (43.4%), cornering (32.4%), speed bump (12.3%) and accel eration (11.9%). These falls, which hamper the well being of animals in tra nsit and are also responsible for bruising which can be prevented by carefu l driving and by adjusting the speed of the vehicle gradually. (C) 2001 Els evier Science B.V. All rights reserved.