Animal welfare is an issue of great importance in modern food production systems. Because animal behavior provides reliable information about animal health and welfare, recent research has aimed at designing monitoring systems capable of measuring behavioral parameters and transforming them into their corresponding behavioral modes. However, network unreliability and high-energy consumption have limited the applicability of those systems. In this study, a 2.4-GHz ZigBee-based mobile ad hoc wireless sensor network (MANET) that is able to overcome those problems is presented. The designed MANET showed high communication reliability, low energy consumption and low packet loss rate (14.8%) due to the deployment of modern communication protocols (e.g. multi-hop communication and handshaking protocol). The measured behavioral parameters were transformed into the corresponding behavioral modes using a multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based artificial neural network (ANN). The best performance of the ANN in terms of the mean squared error (MSE) and the convergence speed was achieved when it was initialized and trained using the Nguyen–Widrow and Levenberg–Marquardt back-propagation algorithms, respectively. The success rate of behavior classification into five classes (i.e. grazing, lying down, walking, standing and others) was 76.2% (σmean=1.06)(σmean=1.06) on average. The results of this study showed an important improvement regarding the performance of the designed MANET and behavior classification compared to the results of other similar studies.