Relationship between Intake of Some Forage and Feeding Behavior of Sheep

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Abstract
The meal-eating behavior of growing sheep fed Penngift crownvetch (CV) or DuPuits alfalfa (AL) cut at late-bud (LB) or full-bloom (FB) and preserved as haylage (HL) or hay (H) was determined with 24 animals during the last 10 days of a 40-day intake and digestion trial. Each metabolism crate was equipped with a door in the manger that was connected to a micro-switch and event recorder. Numbers of meals, eating duration and dry matter intake were determined daily. Average meal size and rates of dry matter consumption were calculated. Stage of maturity and type of preservation had no significant effect on numbers of meals and forage species differed only at P<.10 (LB 11.03, FB 9.35; HL 10.98, H 9.40; CV 9.06, AL 11.22 meals per day). Meal numbers ranged from 12.1 per day for alfalfa LB, HL to 7.1 meals for crownvetch, FB, H. Meal size (g) was not affected by forage species (CV 102.7, AL 95.8) or maturity (LB 102.5, FB 96.1), but haylage fed sheep ate smaller meals (HL 91.7, H 106.7, P <.05). The greater number of meals helps explain the significantly higher dry matter intake of the alfalfa (P <.005) and late-bud forages (P <.001). The crownvetch fed sheep spent 20% more time in the feeder than the alfalfa fed sheep (325 vs. 272 min./day, P <.025), whereas maturity or preservation had no effect. The alfalfa diets were consumed at a 38% faster rate (3.95 vs. 2.86 g/min., P <.005) than the crownvetch diets, and the late-bud forages were consumed at a 31% faster rate than the full-bloom forages (3.84 vs. 2.93 g/min., P <.005). A high correlation (r = 0.834, P <.01) was found between bulk density of the forage diets and numbers of meals per day. No relationship between dry matter digestibility, digestible energy per gram or digestible energy per milliliter and numbers of meals was found. A significant (P <.01) correlation coefficient (r) of 0.914 was found between bulk density of the forage diets and rate of dry matter consumption. Conversion of dry matter consumption to volume (milliliters) per minute eliminated the differences between forage species, maturity or preservation, thus indicating that physical characteristics may be one determinant of food ingestion rate. Copyright © 1974. American Society of Animal Science . Copyright 1974 by American Society of Animal Science.

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