Fig. 1

Correlation between milk and plasma cortisol (ln of pg/ml) concentrations (r = 0.109; not significant). The figure shows on the x-axis the concentration of cortisol in milk (ln of pg/ml) and on the y-axis the concentration of cortisol in plasma (ln of pg/ml) of 135 cows sampled from 2 Italian Simmental (IS) and 2 Italian Holstein (IH) commercial farms. The animals sampled were clinically healthy lactating cows with 70 < DIM < 250 (DIM = days in milking). Milk and plasma samples were collected at the morning milking before feed consumption