Flock management tip for broilers: Smooth feed transitions are vital to final flock performance | Fatten Stalls

Once, as Fifi groomed Figan, Freud climbed up the thin stem of a wild plantain. When he reached the leafy crown, he began swaying wildly back and forth. Had he been a human child, we would have said he was showing off. Suddenly the stem broke and Freud tumbled into the long grass. He was not hurt. He landed close to Jane, and as his head emerged from the grass she saw him look over at Figan. Had he noticed? If he had, he paid no attention but went on being groomed. Freud very quietly climbed another tree and began to feed.

That’s too bad, because philosophers tend to regard such statements as the best possible evidence of another being’s consciousness, even among humans. Without one, no matter how long I stared into the crow’s black pupil, wishing I could see into the phantasmagoria of its mind, I could never really know whether it was conscious. I’d have to be content with circumstantial evidence.

A few years ago while I was watching elephants in the Samburu National Reserve in Northern Kenya with elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton, I noticed a teenaged female, Babyl, who walked very slowly and had difficulty taking each step. I learned she’d been crippled for years, but the other members of her herd never left her behind. They’d walk a while, then stop and look around to see where she was. If Babyl lagged, some would wait for her. If she’d been left alone, she would have fallen prey to a lion or other predator. Sometimes the matriarch would even feed Babyl. Babyl’s friends had nothing to gain by helping her, as she could do nothing for them. Nonetheless, they adjusted their behavior to allow Babyl to remain with the group.  

All luminescence measurements were performed using a Risø TL/OSL DA-15 automated single-grain system equipped with a 90Sr/90Y beta source (64). A green laser was used to stimulate the grains for 1 s, and the OSL signal was detected through a 2.5-mm-thick U-340 filter and convex quartz lens placed in front of the photomultiplier tube. A preheat plateau test performed on 5-mm aliquots of sample T8SKIG02 was used to determine the preheat temperature (220°C for 10 s) used with a cut-heat of 160°C for the single-aliquot regenerative dose (SAR) protocol (65). OSL stimulation was performed at 125°C for 1 s, and the initial and background OSL signals were summed over the first 0.1 s and final 0.2 s, respectively. Typical decay curves and a dose-response curve measured for a single grain of quartz from sample T8SKIG02 are shown in fig. S6. Dose-recovery experiments performed on samples T8SKIG02 (ratio of 0.96 ± 0.03 and overdispersion of 15 ± 1%) and T8GABB01 (ratio of 1.01 ± 0.03 and overdispersion of 0 ± 0%) suggest that the SAR protocol was appropriate for OSL dating. The overdispersion values determined from dose-recovery experiments provided estimates of the amount of scatter caused by intrinsic sources of uncertainty that is beyond measurement uncertainties incorporated into a natural De distribution (66).

Pigs remain in the slotted floor units for two months in summer, then go to pasture. In the winter, pigs are finished out on concrete feeding floors nearby.

At 47, I was a decade and a half younger than the median age for breast cancer diagnosis in the United States. Was this just bad luck? Maybe, but the journalist in me was still curious to know: Why me? So I dug into the literature on risk factors to see where I might have fit in. It’s an impossible question to answer definitively for an individual, like trying to prove that a single weather event was caused by climate change. As one doctor told me, “You know who’s at risk for getting breast cancer? People with breasts!”

The statement adds that noise from the site will be ‘negligible’ and the nearest residential property was 300 metres from the proposed facility.

Back in 1961, Roger and Richard mortgaged the farm to put the farrowing house up, says Steve. “The first group of pigs was wonderful, and the second group of pigs about died of scours and they said, ‘What have we gotten ourselves into?’”

We used TCN surface-exposure dating and OSL analyses to constrain the timing of deglaciation in the former MnIS flow path. Samples for TCN analysis were taken from glacially transported boulders within a relatively small area (i.e., 102 to 104 m2) and were assumed to be contemporaneous (i.e., with no evidence to suggest otherwise, adjacent boulders are assumed to have been deposited at broadly the same time during ice sheet wastage) (52). We report a total of 26 new cosmogenic 10Be surface exposure ages from seven carefully chosen sites situated at various key points along the flowline of the former MnIS. An additional 13 10Be ages, from two other sites, can be used to constrain the MnIS retreat chronology; these have been reported previously (53, 54) but are presented here with recalculated exposure ages. The combined dataset of 39 10Be samples is presented in table S2. Other published 10Be ages from three other sites are shown in Fig. 1 as supporting evidence of ice sheet retreat in NW Scotland. These were recalculated, as above, from previous studies (55, 56). These ages are not presented in tables S2 to S12 in data file S1 or used in the Bayesian modeling analysis as they lie outside the main flow path of the ice stream. OSL dating of proglacial and ice-marginal sediments has been used successfully elsewhere to constrain ice sheet margin behavior and the timing of deglaciation around the British Isles (57, 58). We report three new OSL ages from two carefully chosen sites to augment our 10Be TCN dataset (table S5). OSL samples were taken from glacigenic sediments directly relating to the margin of the former MnIS.

Official festivities, and the ribbon cutting ceremony, begin at 11 a.m. Those slated to speak include Grove Mayor Ed Trumbull and Har-Ber Village Executive Director Amelia Chamberlain.

I’d come to the bird hospital, and to India, to see firsthand the Jains’ moral system at work in the world. Jains make up less than 1 percent of India’s population. Despite millennia spent criticizing the Hindu majority, the Jains have sometimes gained the ear of power. During the 13th century, they converted a Hindu king, and persuaded him to enact the subcontinent’s first animal-welfare laws. There is evidence that the Jains influenced the Buddha himself. And when Gandhi developed his most radical ideas about nonviolence, a Jain friend played philosophical muse.

Spokesman Hans Kriek said some of the pigs in the so-called mating crates were in fact in sow crates.