New challenges and a submitted PhD Thesis

Greetings from sunny Skåneland in Sweden!

I’m excited to tell that I have just handed in my PhD thesis! It was a great feeling pressing ‘send’ which marked the final endpoint to my huge calving cow project.

I’m thrilled to have joined the Animal Group at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences as a postdoctoral researcher just 4 days after handing in the thesis. I’m based at the Department of Biosystems and Technology in Alnarp. The below photo shows a view from the coatal area where I currently live. I have always wanted to live close to the coast, and now I have the chance to see the sun set over my home country every night – Hey Denmark!

I’m currently in the brainstorming phase, planning new projects on super exciting themes. I look forward to running my own projects here very soon!

What can cows smell and how do we test this? – Our article about olfactory test development is in the University Media (Danish)

Danish article about how to test olfactory investigation in cattle just out.

Find it via the link: Article

Open access to our newest article

Ever wondered how to test olfactory investigation in cattle?

Or if cows like the smell of coffee?

Well, we wondered the same and this resulted in a brand new study, which just came out today.

For the next 50 days the article is freely accessible so please feel free to share: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Vr6WcF2OSze

Highlights of the study:

• The first Habituation/Dishabituation Test adapted for and applied to cattle.
• Cows and heifers can distinguish between complex odours (coffee and orange juice) and show increased interest in coffee
• A new potential to use odours when adapting or enriching the environment in which we keep cattle?

Voted 1st in the Best Poster Presentation Award at WAFL 2017

This summer has been packed with a lot of writing and two thrilling conferences.

ISAE 2017 was held in Aarhus, my home town, and was a great assembly of motivated delegates exchanging knowledge and networking. As this was also my last ISAE conference as an ISAE student representative, I was very pleased to see our student event – Eating with Ethologists – run smoothly with a lot of dedicated people interacting.

I also had great feed back on our newest study on olfactory investigation in dairy cattle which I presented on the first day of the conference just a few days after our papers had been accepted. Thank for the many good questions and the positive feed back on this new angle. The article can be found here, and please don´t hesitate to ask me more questions.

 

Later in September I joined my fist WAFL conference (International Conference on Assessment of Animal Walfare on Farm and Group Level) in Ede, The Netherlands. This was also a very rewarding and intriguing conference and I´ll definitely be joing in 2020.

I especially felt very honored being voted 1st in the Best Poster Presentation Award by the conference attendees. Thank you all and thanks for all the great talks and discussions by the poster. I really enjoyed this!

The study will soon be published, and I promise more details will be out be then.

Lastly a huge thanks to all the people behind these conferences!

#wafl2017 🙏🏻 #ISAE2017

Abstracts approved for international conferences 2017, ISAE and WAFL

I´m thrilled to announce that I´ll be presenting two of my experiments on two different international conferences this year: ISAE – International Society for Applied Ethology and WAFL – Assessment of Animal Welfare at Farm and Group Level.

The titles are:

ISAE: ‘Olfactory enrichment for cattle? Development of olfactory investigation test for cattle’ – theater presentation

WAFL: ‘The self-guided calving pen’ – poster presentaton

Both presentations will be available here after the conferences.

 

Organic cows see the first grass of spring

This weekend I participated when the Danish organic cows were released onto the first grass of spring. This is a huge event every year in Denmark, and it is always fun to see the cows jumping of joy into the field.

This event also gave us an opportunity to present our project ‘The self-guided cow’ to the public which was also a great experience. I personally loved watching the kid´s reaction to a video I made illustrating how the dairy calf is born.

New article just out

It is always a pleasure to finally see your work as a finished piece. What started out as a small pilot investigation turned my head around and forced me to step back and see things from a different perspective. Back to basics. My cows seemed to be controlled by something we could not control when choosing calving site. They ended up calving the almost exact same spot and I had no idea why. I turned to the literature to find answers, and it turned out that in relation to calving site selection, studies were very limited. In the end this study opened a whole new aspect in my research resulting in brand new plans, which I´ll come back to shortly. The study is just published in Journal of Dairy Science and a free full copy can be obtained following the link: Article

Please don´t hesitate to contact me if questions arise in relation to this study.