An adequate model to describe the hoof temperature data included ambient temperature (°C), hoof (coded as: front-left, front-right, hind-left and hind-right) and camera aspect (coded as: front, lateral, medial and rear) ( Table 1) ; removing any of these terms from the model significantly worsened model fit (full model: DIC = 17270.6; removing ambient temperature: DIC = 18846.8; removing hoof: DIC = 17309.8; removing aspect: DIC = 17297.2). Adding extra terms to the model improved the model fit, often markedly so; for example, a quadratic term for ambient temperature (DIC = 14730.3) or eye temperature as a normalising factor (DIC = 16648.1). However, this was at the expense of the resulting model being poor as a predictive tool, because the variance for the higher-order parameters needed to be so large to incorporate the observed differences amongst animals. Accordingly, the adequate model was used in subsequent analyses.