Effect of nursing or mentoring by adult cows on physical activity, performance and meat quality of fattening beef calves kept on alpine pastures

BACKGROUND:
Compared with weaned calves, nursed calves benefit from access to milk as nutrient-dense feed andmentoring by their dams. Bothmay be decisive for growth under difficult conditions such as grazing on alpine pastures, where experience could play an essential role. These factors were investigated separately by comparing nursed calves with calves weaned at 3 months of age and grazing with or without amentor cow (n = 8 calves).
RESULTS:
Weaned calves with mentor cows spent less time lying and walked more than nursed calves. Irrespective of whether they had a mentor cow or not, the weaned calves grew slower than the nursed calves (357, 428 and 1324 g day−1 respectively). This also adversely affected slaughter weight, dressing percentage, conformation and fat cover at slaughter. In general, mentoring had no effect. Meat quality did not differ whetherweaned calveswere mentored or not. Nursed calveswere superior in intramuscular fat content, tenderness and water-holding capacity.
CONCLUSION:
The availability ofmilk appeared to be muchmore important to the calves under demanding grazing conditions than did mentoring. The differences in growth rate were accompanied by unexpectedly large differences in meat quality, showing that early weaning was not suitable for this system.