Fig 1.
Top view of the experimental barn, including all three sections. Thick lines around individual calving pens represent covered sides, and the “window” illustrates where the mechanical gate (grey insertion in the “window”) was installed in all individual calving pens. Vertically attached brushes, drinking cups and feed tables are shown.
Fig 2.
The levels of closing the gate.
A: The view from an individual calving pen with open gate, representing the start point for all cows (initial training, step 1) and the treatment termed “permanently open gate”. B: The top bar of the gate being closed (corresponding to training step 2 for cows housed with “functional gates”). C: The trainer holding the gate, half way open, in order for the cow to see the way out (corresponding to training step 3 for cows housed with functional gates). D: The view from inside the gated individual calving pens with the gate fully closed (corresponding to training step 4 for cows housed with “functional gates”).
Fig 3.
Days prior to experimental start, indicating all initial procedures and assessments. Moved to the barn (day -14), temperament test (day -12) after a settling period (day -14 to -12), initial training (day -12 to -3), entering and re-entering tests (day -3 and -2) leading to either inclusion or exclusion (day -1) and experimental start (day 0).
Table 1.
Personality assessment.
Table 2.
Description of fear-related behaviour to be absent when evaluating all trained cows irrespective of treatment according to their success criterion.
Fig 4.
Graphs of mean training level per training bout for each treatment illustrating the progress during the initial training period (divided onto treatment: “Functional gates” and “permanently open gates”).
Training level: Step 0 (not able to follow the trainer), step 1 (following the trainer in and out of individual calving pen = success criterion for “permanently open gates”) and step 4 (following the trainer in and out of individual calving pen while opening the gate without any help or encouragement = success criterion for “functional gates”). Training bouts 1–9 (2 bouts per day) leading to experimental start (shown in light grey) and subsequent weekly post training checks 1.1 to 1.6 (1 bout per day) during the experiment (shown in dark grey).
Table 3.
Ethogram of continuously recorded behaviour during the 12-h period prior to calving.
Table 4.
Summary of the output from the final model including 4 fixed effects.