Organ donation and the ethics of muddling through

Organ donation offers opportunities for people in critical care units to help save the lives of other patients. It is not always easy, however, to handle the transition from treating a patient to preserving a potential donor, and organ donation consistently provokes ethical questions in critical care units. What do we expect ethics to deliver? In light of a recent ethics conference in Denmark, we suggest that by acknowledging that decisions made in the clinic rarely abide to rational decision trees with clear ethical priorities, we can better learn from each other's experiences. We suggest embracing an 'ethics of muddling through' to enhance relevant reflections and stimulate a productive dialogue among health professionals

Dairy cows’ motivation to nurse their calves

\ua9 The Author(s) 2024. When weaning offspring, female mammals limit nursing opportunities. This study aimed to investigate whether imposing a gradual reduction in daily contact time, by separating cows from their calves as an attempt to stimulate weaning, reduced dairy cows’ motivation to nurse their calves. For seven weeks, 84 Holstein–Friesian cow-calf pairs were housed with either full-time (23 h contact/d), part-time (10 h contact/d), or no contact. In the following two weeks, half of full- and part-time pairs were subjected to reduced contact (50% of initial contact in week 8, 25% of initial contact in week 9), while the other half continued with unchanged contact. In weeks 8 and 9, cows’ motivation to obtain full contact to and opportunity to nurse their calves was measured using weighted push gates using a novel maximum price paid method providing an alternative choice to the cows to reduce frustration. Cows with reduced calf contact were more motivated than cows with unchanged contact; however, cows used the alternative choice less than expected. The results show that cows’ motivation for full calf contact and opportunity to nurse increases when daily calf contact is reduced, illustrating that dairy cows are motivated to continue nursing their 9- to 10-week-old calves

Dairy cows housed both full- and part-time with their calves form strong maternal bonds

\ua9 2024 The Authors. Dairy cow and calf are typically separated shortly after calving preventing the formation of a maternal-filial bond. To allow some cow-calf contact, part-time contact during the first weeks is thought to be a feasible solution, but it is unknown if it weakens maternal bond, i.e., if maternal motivation is lower. This study aimed to investigate how different amounts of calf contact (full-time, part-time, and no contact) affect cows’ maternal motivation. Using pneumatic push gates, we assessed cows’ motivation to access their own calf using the maximum price paid (MPP) method. To mitigate frustration at high prices, cows could also access an unfamiliar calf at a constant low price. We expected that cows would access the unfamiliar calf when reaching the maximum price that they were motivated to pay to access their own calf. Following 48 h in a calving pen, cow-calf pairs were allocated to three different treatments: full-time (23 h contact/d, 28 pairs), part-time (10 h contact/d, 27 pairs), and no contact (0 h contact/d, 26 pairs). Approximately 40 d after calving, cows were trained to pass through each of two push gates: one leading to their own and one leading to an unfamiliar calf. The weight on the gate leading to the cows’ own calf increased following each passing, while the gate leading to the unfamiliar calf remained light. Cows were tested once daily, until they failed to pass through the gate leading to their own calf on two consecutive days. MPP was analysed using a Cox\u27s proportional hazards mixed effects model. Fewer no-contact cows than full- and part-time cows fulfilled the learning criteria. Furthermore, no-contact cows paid a lower maximum price compared to the two contact treatments, while the MPP of full- and part-time cows did not differ. Most cows remained in the start box if they did not pass the gate to their own calf, indicating that an unfamiliar calf could not substitute for their own calf at high prices. We conclude that cows with part-time calf contact form a maternal bond of similar strength to cows with full-time calf contact. Additionally, cows separated from their calf at 48 h after calving have a weaker maternal motivation at 40 days postpartum

Rapid Brain Cooling in Intubated Pigs through Nasal Flushing with Oxygen: Prevention of Brain Hyperthermia

Local cooling of the brain by the respiratory air is found in many animal species. The mechanism is based on cooling of the nasal vein blood and heat transfer in the cavernous sinus/carotid artery complex and is therefore not active in anaesthetised, intubated animals. The present experiment was made to investigate the effects of oxygen flushing of the nasal cavities in such animals. Nine anaesthetised, intubated male pigs were used. The temperatures in the third ventricle and rectum were measured continuously. Oxygen was infused into the nasal cavities during 10 min periods interrupted by 10 min without flow. The nasal oxygen flow constantly induced a rapid, reversible and flow dependant decrease in brain temperature: 0.25°C ± 0.04, (n = 2) (mean ± SD, n) at <4 l/min; 1.35°C ± 0.78, (n = 20) at 4–6 l/min; and 1.44°C ± 0.62, (n = 6) at >6 l/min. The ventricle temperature decreased 0.59°C ± 0.23, (n = 8) when the animals were transferred to spontaneous respiration and the tracheal tube removed. It may be possible to protect the brain in intubated animals and humans from heat-induced damages by establishment of nasal flushing

Growth rate, health and welfare in a dairy herd with natural suckling until 6–8 weeks of age: a case report

Over a period of two years, growth rate and health were measured for dairy calves allowed to suckle their mothers up to 6–8 weeks of age. Thirty-one calves were weighted weekly, and the mean daily growth rate was 1.2 ± 0.03 kg from birth up to 13 weeks of age. Illness in calves and young stock was not observed. In the cows, the mean incidences of ketosis, displaced abomasum, puerperal paresis, mastitis, teat injury and retained placenta were 0, 0, 8, 22, 1 and 1%, respectively, during a 6-year period. The mean daily gain of 56 growing bulls was 1.4 kg when slaughtered at 15 months of age, which is higher than the mean daily gain of 0.95 kg in the population. Probiotics, hormones and vaccines were not used, and antibiotics were only used for treating illness. The present study indicates many advantages and few problems when dairy calves are penned together with the cows and allowed natural feeding up to 6–8 weeks of age. This production system was easy to manage, preferred by the farmer, and may satisfy the public concern regarding the practice of immediate separation of cow and calf in commercial milk production

Model Adaptation with Synthetic and Real Data for Semantic Dense Foggy Scene Understanding

This work addresses the problem of semantic scene understanding under dense fog. Although considerable progress has been made in semantic scene understanding, it is mainly related to clear-weather scenes. Extending recognition methods to adverse weather conditions such as fog is crucial for outdoor applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named Curriculum Model Adaptation (CMAda), which gradually adapts a semantic segmentation model from light synthetic fog to dense real fog in multiple steps, using both synthetic and real foggy data. In addition, we present three other main stand-alone contributions: 1) a novel method to add synthetic fog to real, clear-weather scenes using semantic input; 2) a new fog density estimator; 3) the Foggy Zurich dataset comprising $3808$ real foggy images, with pixel-level semantic annotations for $16$ images with dense fog. Our experiments show that 1) our fog simulation slightly outperforms a state-of-the-art competing simulation with respect to the task of semantic foggy scene understanding (SFSU); 2) CMAda improves the performance of state-of-the-art models for SFSU significantly by leveraging unlabeled real foggy data. The datasets and code are publicly available.Comment: final version, ECCV 201