Animals, Volume 12, Issue 2

Copy number variants (CNVs) are one of the major contributors to genetic diversity and phenotypic variation in livestock. The aim of this work is to identify CNVs and perform, for the first time, a CNV-based population genetics analysis with five Ita...

Preventative measures, such as biosecurity and vaccinations, are essential but not sufficient to ensure high standards of health in pig production systems. Restrictive, barren housing and many widely used management practices that cause pain and stre...

Slaughter weight (SW) is critical for dry-cured ham production systems with heavy pigs. A total of 159 C21 Goland pigs (gilts and barrows) at 95 ± 9.0 kg body weight (BW) from three batches were used to investigate the impact of ad libitum fee...

Background: As a unique skin derivative of birds, the uropygial gland has a potential role in maintaining feather health and appearance. Cage-reared ducks usually have a worse feather condition than floor-reared ducks. We suspected that the metabolic...

Knowledge regarding training, competition, and management routines of agility dogs is lacking. Through a retrospective online questionnaire, Finnish owners and handlers of 745 competition-level agility dogs provided information on training routines a...

There is no doubt that the cultural and urban environments contributed to the animal–human interaction in the daily life of the ancient Roman world. The singularity of the circumstances of the burial of Pompeii and Herculaneum, together with li...

In the United States swine industry, preweaning mortality represents the highest mortality rate of any production phase, nearly half attributed to crushing. The overarching aim of this study was to determine if enrichment ropes would entice neonatal...

In this retrospective study, we assessed the accuracy of different blood flow imaging in diagnosing testicular tumor types in dogs. We recruited 27 dogs with leydigomas (14), seminomas (eight), sertoliomas (six), and mixed cells (five) confirmed hist...

The treatment of chronic congestive heart failure (CHF), secondary to myxomatous mitral valve disease (MMVD) in dogs, has considerably changed in the last fifty years. An analysis of the literature concerning the therapy of chronic CHF in dogs affect...

Pikeperch Sander lucioperca is a piscivorous species considered a promising candidate for the diversification of intensive aquaculture. This study aimed to determine the effect of a sustained-release delivery system incorporating mammalian gonadotrop...

The mammary gland is a complicated organ comprising several types of cells, and it undergoes extensive morphogenetic and metabolic changes during the female reproductive cycle. RNA editing is a posttranscriptional modification event occurring at the...

This study investigated potentially affiliative behaviors in grow-finish pigs, how these behaviors changed over time and their relationship to agonistic behaviors. A total of 257 Yorkshire barrows were observed for agonistic (reciprocal fights, attac...

Myostatin (MSTN) is a major negative regulator of skeletal muscle mass and causes a variety of metabolic changes. However, the effect of MSTN knockout on bile acid metabolism has rarely been reported. In this study, the physiological and biochemical...

Tail docking has been used in the pig industry to decrease the occurrence of tail biting behavior. This abnormal behavior has a multifactorial origin since it is a response to simultaneous environmental, nutritional and management changes. Given the...

Telomere length has attracted much interest as a topic of study in human reproduction; furthermore, the link between sperm telomere length and fertility outcomes has been investigated in other species. This biomarker, however, has not been much explo...

Little is known on the effect of light on pig behaviour. The choice behaviour of weaned piglets kept under two different light-emitting diode (LED) illuminance levels was investigated: 32 piglets (in two batches) were housed in a preference test room...

Selecting the minimal best subset out of a huge number of factors for influencing the response is a fundamental and very challenging NP-hard problem because the presence of many redundant genes results in over-fitting easily while missing an importan...

Perineal hernia refers to the herniation of pelvic and abdominal viscera into the subcutaneous perineal region through a pelvic diaphragm weakness: a concomitant prostatic disease is observed in 25–59% of cases. Prostatectomy involves the remov...

Five natural historic cheeses of Southern Italy were investigated—Caciocavallo Palermitano (CP), Casizolu del Montiferru (CdM), Vastedda della Valle del Belìce (VVB), Pecorino Siciliano (PS), and Caprino Nicastrese (CN)—which are p...

The aim of the study was to compare and demonstrate whether commercial rennet ripening cheeses available on the market in summer and winter differ in their chemical composition, fatty acid profile, content of cis9trans11 C18:2 (CLA) acid and other tr...

The house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus, creates significant public health risks for residents in low-income multi-family dwellings (MFDs). This study was designed to evaluate the spatial distribution of house mice in MFDs. Four low-income high-rise...

Total or partial vulvo-vaginectomy or vaginectomy are not routinely performed due to the complexity of the techniques and because they are considered radical treatments. Little information can be found in the literature, as the same technique is ofte...

(1) Background: Lumbosacral traumatic injuries are reported as 39% of canine vertebral lesions. This area is prone to fracture and luxation. Several surgical techniques were described from 1975 to 2021 to stabilize the traumatic injuries of the lumbo...

RNA polyadenylation is an important step in the messenger RNA (mRNA) maturation process, and the first step is recognizing the polyadenylation signal (PAS). The PAS type and distribution is a key determinant of post-transcriptional mRNA modification...

Appropriate matching of rider–horse sizes is becoming an increasingly important issue of riding horses’ care, as the human population becomes heavier. Recently, infrared thermography (IRT) was considered to be effective in differing the e...

Individuals vary in their potential to acquire and transmit infections, but this fact is currently underexploited in disease control strategies. We trialled a trait-based vaccination strategy to reduce tuberculosis in free-living meerkats by targetin...

Lameness represents one of the main causes of decreased productive performance and impaired animal welfare in the bovine industry. Young beef bulls are predisposed to develop diseases of the growing skeleton, especially growth plate lesions. Early di...

The attitude towards animals in research depends on both the role of the stakeholder and their personal characteristics. Most studies on the subject have been carried out on stakeholders from biomedical research institutes with comparatively few soci...

Platelet lysate (PL) is an attractive platelet-based therapeutic tool and has shown promise as xeno-free replacement for fetal bovine serum (FBS) in human and equine mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) culture. Here, we established a scalable buffy-coat-b...

The first two European outbreaks of herpetic pneumonia caused by Psittacid alphaherpesvirus-5 were diagnosed based on gross pathology findings, histological examination, transmission electron microscopy visualization and genome sequencing. The outbre...

Veterinary visits can be stressful for dogs, but how their wellbeing changes during a visit is not well understood. Music therapy has been successfully used in clinical practice to alleviate stress and anxiety in people. The present study aimed to un...

There has been increased public interest and concerns in issues such as farm animal welfare (FAW) on the island of Ireland, stoked in part by political and governance changes, such as Brexit and COVID-19. Front-of-pack food labelling represents a pri...

Catarrhine primates gesture preferentially with their right hands, which led to the hypothesis of a gestural origin of human left-hemispheric specialization for language. However, the factors influencing this gestural laterality remain understudied i...

Growth is an important heritable economic trait for dromedaries and necessary for planning a successful breeding program. Until now, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and QTL-mapping have identified significant single nucleotide polymorphisms (S...

The present study investigated the influence of broiler age on the AMEn of wheat, sorghum, barley, and corn using the substitution method at six different ages (days 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, and 42). A corn-soybean meal basal diet was formulated and, the t...

The affective state is an integrated aspect of farm animal welfare, which is understood as the animals’ perception of their living environment and of their internal biological functioning. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to explore an...

The effects of the zinc and fibre source in piglets’ diet on the bone mineral content, density, and strength parameters of the femur were investigated using 24 piglets fed a diet supplemented with either lignocellulose (LC) or potato fibre (PF)...

Congenital hearing loss is recognized in humans and other terrestrial species. However, there is a lack of information on its prevalence or pathophysiology in pinnipeds. It is important to have baseline knowledge on marine mammal malformations in the...

The demand of optimal protein for human consumption is growing. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has highlighted aquaculture as one of the most promising alternatives for this protein supply gap due to the high efficiency of fish growth. H...

So far, larval rearing in vitro has been an important method in the assessment of bee toxicology, particularly in pesticide risk assessment. However, natural products are increasingly used to control honey bee pathogens or to enhance bee immunity, bu...

Stress-induced hyperthermia (SIH) is a physiological response to acute stressors in mammals, shown as an increase in core body temperature, with redirection of blood flow from the periphery to vital organs. Typical temperature assessment methods for...

The main conditions and diseases considered painful in dairy cows are mastitis, lameness, calving (including dystocia and caesarean section) and metritis. The cattle literature reports that deviation from normal daily activity patterns (both increase...

Increasing productivity through continued animal genetic improvement is a crucial part of implementing sustainable livestock intensification programs. In Zebu cattle, the lack of sexual precocity is one of the main obstacles to improving beef product...

Helminths are metazoan parasites infecting around 1.5 billion people all over the world. During coevolution with hosts, worms have developed numerous ways to trick and evade the host immune response, and because of their size, they cannot be internal...

The authors wish to make the following correction to their paper [...]

A 2 × 3 factorial experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of two dietary methionine levels (Met; 30% and 45% of Lys content) and three arginine levels (Arg; 90%, 100%, and 110% of Lys content) on plumage development in 4- and 16-week-o...

Excessive barking is a major source of noise pollution in dog kennels and negatively impacts welfare. Because resources are often limited, minimizing barking in the simplest and most easily implementable way is imperative. This pilot study implemente...

The objective of this case-control study was to determine if feeding behavior data collected from an automated milk feeder (AMF) could be used to predict neonatal calf diarrhea (NCD) in the days surrounding diagnosis in pre-weaned group housed dairy...

This study was conducted to evaluate the productive performance, intestinal health, and description of the cecum microbiota in broilers supplemented with β-mannanases (MNs) and bacteriophages (BPs). Six hundred one-day-old broilers were divided...

This study aimed to assess the heart rate (HR) responses of avalanche SAR dogs and handlers under working field conditions. Thirteen SAR units (dogs and handlers) performed an exercise (Endurance) consisting of approximately 5.5 km of rough tracks th...