Search Results (28)

Fat-tailed dunnarts (Sminthopsis crassicaudata) are an emerging model species for developmental, reproductive, and conservation biology research. Understanding their husbandry and enrichment needs is integral to ensuring best welfare in captive-bred populations. This was made evident following the sudden deaths of three dunnarts from a population housed at a university research facility between 2018 and 2022. Necropsy results revealed significant trichobezoars causing gastrointestinal obstruction. Following these findings, adjustments were made to the dunnart enclosures with the addition of autoclaved tree bark to capture loose fur as well as the inclusion of paraffin oil in the diet for the purpose of gastrointestinal lubrication. Since these husbandry interventions, no further deaths attributed to trichobezoars have been reported. Here, we present these data and outline new best practice methods for captive dunnart husbandry. Full article

Feed conversion ratio (FCR) is a critical indicator of production efficiency in livestock husbandry. Improving FCR is essential for optimizing resource utilization and enhancing productivity. Traditional methods for FCR optimization rely on experience and long-term data collection, which are time-consuming and inefficient. This study explores the feasibility of predicting long-term FCR using short-term FCR data based on machine learning techniques. We employed nineteen machine learning algorithms, including Linear Regression, support vector machines (SVMs), and Gradient Boosting, using historical datasets to train and validate the models. The results show that the Gradient Boosting model demonstrated superior performance, achieving a coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.72 and a correlation of 0.85 between predicted and actual values when the testing interval exceeded 40 kg. Therefore, we recommend a minimum feeding measurement interval of 40 kg. Furthermore, when the testing interval was set to 40 kg and further refined to the range of 50–90 kg, the model achieved an R² of 0.81 and a correlation of 0.90 for FCR prediction in the 30–105 kg range. Among the 19 machine learning algorithms tested, Gradient Boosting, LightGBM, and CatBoost showed superior performance, with Gradient Boosting achieving the best results. Considering practical production requirements, the 50–90 kg feeding stage proved to be the most ideal for FCR testing. This study provides a more effective method for predicting feed efficiency and offers robust data support for precision livestock farming. Full article

This study aims to explore body weight estimation for cattle in both standing and lying postures, using 3D data. We apply a Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based (UAV-based) LiDAR system to collect data during routine resting periods between feedings in the natural husbandry conditions of a commercial farm, which ensures minimal interruption to the animals. Ground truth data are obtained by weighing cattle as they voluntarily pass an environmentally embedded scale. We have developed separate models for standing and lying postures and trained them on features extracted from the segmented point clouds of cattle with unique identifiers (UIDs). The models for standing posture achieve high accuracy, with a best-performance model, Random Forest, obtaining an $R^2$ of 0.94, an MAE of 4.72 kg, and an RMSE of 6.33 kg. Multiple linear regression models are trained to estimate body weight for the lying posture, using volume- and posture-wise characteristics. The model used 1 cm as the thickness of the slice-wise volume calculation, achieving an $R^2$ of 0.71, an MAE of 7.71 kg, and an RMSE of 9.56 kg. These results highlight the potential of UAV-based LiDAR data for accurate and non-intrusive estimation of cattle body weight in lying and standing postures, which paves the way for improved management practices in precision livestock farming. Full article

The health of adult dogs and cats is affected positively or negatively by their development in utero and throughout postnatal growth. Preventive veterinary care is particularly important when animals are physiologically immature and sensitive to modifiable environmental factors. Veterinary nurses/technicians are often at the forefront of promoting healthy development, reinforcing the work of veterinarians and using their knowledge, experience, and passion to lead initiatives with breeders and pet guardians. This opinion article considers the role of qualified veterinary nurses/technicians in the care of puppies and kittens throughout their developmental life stages—gestation, the suckling period, growth post-weaning to puberty or neutering, and late growth to adulthood. Much of their influence is through the education of pet carers; they provide trustworthy information relevant to the individual pet and focused on the practicalities of best husbandry practices. These include practical advice on recognizing dystocia, neonatal care, weaning, introduction to the new home, the prevention and management of infectious diseases, socialization with conspecifics and humans, habituation to potential environmental stresses, nutrition, oral hygiene, and grooming. The veterinary nurse’s goal is not only to see young pets develop into healthy, well-adjusted adults but also to see pet guardians developing sustainable human–animal bonds. Full article

Zoo enclosure design, and housing and husbandry protocols, will always be a compromise between what a species has evolved to do and what is possible to offer in a human-created environment. For some species, behaviours that are commonly performed in the wild may be constrained by husbandry practices that are used for ease or aesthetics or are accepted conventions. As zoos place more emphasis on positive animal welfare states, zoo enclosures should be scrutinised to check that what is provided, in terms of useful space, appropriate replication of habitat features, and maximal potential for natural behaviour performance, is relevant to the species and individuals being housed. For some species, zoos need to grapple with tough questions where the answer may not seem immediately obvious to ensure they are continuously improving standards of care, opportunities for the performance of species-typical behaviours, and advancing the attainment of positive welfare states. Determining the importance of flight, for example, and what this behaviour adds to the quality of life of a zoo-housed bird, is an important question that needs addressing to truly advance aviculture and how we determine bird welfare. This paper provides questions that should be answered and poses measures of what flight means to a bird, to provide evidence for the development and evolution of zoo bird housing. If we can devise some way of asking the animals in our care what they need, we can more firmly support decisions made that surround enclosure design, and housing decisions. Ultimately, this means gathering evidence on whether birds like to fly (e.g., from birds in training or demonstration activities) by applying mixed methods approaches of behavioural analysis, data on wild ecology, qualitative behavioural assessment, and cognitive bias testing to develop a robust suite of tools to address avian welfare considerations. Avian welfare scientists should attempt to define what meaningful flight is (i.e., flight that truly suggests a bird is flying) in order to support guidelines on aviary dimensions, space allowance, and welfare outputs from birds in both flighted and flight-restricted populations, and to determine what is most appropriate for an individual species. Changing the term “best practice” husbandry guidelines to “better practice” husbandry guidelines would instil the importance of regular review and reassessment of housing and management suitability for a species to ensure such care regimes remain appropriate. With an increasingly welfare-savvy public visiting zoos, it is essential that we seek more evidence to support and justify how birds are kept and ultimately use such evidence to enact changes to practices that are shown to infringe on avian welfare. Full article

This paper addresses the potential for technology to support husbandry and enrichment opportunities that enhance the welfare of zoo and sanctuary-housed nocturnal and crepuscular species. This topic was investigated through the medium of a multidisciplinary workshop (Moon Jam) that brought together species experts, zoo designers, Animal-Computer Interaction researchers and post-graduate students in collaborative discussions and design sessions. We explain the context through an examination of existing research and current practices, and report on specific challenges raised and addressed during the Moon Jam, highlighting and discussing key themes that emerged. Finally, we offer a set of guidelines to support the integration of technology into the design of animal husbandry and enrichment that support wellbeing, to advance the best practices in keeping and managing nocturnal and crepuscular animals. Full article

As the sheep industry rapidly moves towards modernization, digitization, and intelligence, there is a need to build breeding farms integrated with big data. By collecting individual information on sheep, precision breeding can be conducted to improve breeding efficiency, reduce costs, and promote healthy breeding practices. In this context, the accurate identification of individual sheep is essential for establishing digitized sheep farms and precision animal husbandry. Currently, scholars utilize deep learning technology to construct recognition models, learning the biological features of sheep faces to achieve accurate identification. However, existing research methods are limited to pattern recognition at the image level, leading to a lack of diversity in recognition methods. Therefore, this study focuses on the small-tailed Han sheep and develops a sheep face recognition method based on three-dimensional reconstruction technology and feature point matching, aiming to enrich the theoretical research of sheep face recognition technology. The specific recognition approach is as follows: full-angle sheep face images of experimental sheep are collected, and corresponding three-dimensional sheep face models are generated using three-dimensional reconstruction technology, further obtaining three-dimensional sheep face images from three different perspectives. Additionally, this study developed a sheep face orientation recognition algorithm called the sheep face orientation recognition algorithm (SFORA). The SFORA incorporates the ECA mechanism to further enhance recognition performance. Ultimately, the SFORA has a model size of only 5.3 MB, with accuracy and F1 score reaching 99.6% and 99.5%, respectively. During the recognition task, the SFORA is first used for sheep face orientation recognition, followed by matching the recognition image with the corresponding three-dimensional sheep face image based on the established SuperGlue feature-matching algorithm, ultimately outputting the recognition result. Experimental results indicate that when the confidence threshold is set to 0.4, SuperGlue achieves the best matching performance, with matching accuracies for the front, left, and right faces reaching 96.0%, 94.2%, and 96.3%, respectively. This study enriches the theoretical research on sheep face recognition technology and provides technical support. Full article

Callimico (Callimico goeldii) are members of the callitrichid family, and a species of conservation concern managed within the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) ex situ program. They benefit from extensive ‘Best Practice’ guidelines developed by the Callitrichid Taxon Advisory Group (TAG), but there are gaps in species-specific knowledge and captive management research. A survey was created to understand and evaluate current housing and husbandry within EAZA collections holding callimico. The questionnaire allowed collation of details including enclosure size along with prevalence of mixed species exhibits, use of UV-B lighting, enclosure complexity and enrichment routines. Responding collections represented 44% of the current callimico holders, with the results allowing comparative analysis of current practice against the guidelines and considering previous research. Significant positive differences were discovered between minimum recommended enclosure dimensions, including total enclosure volume, 32 m³ (p < 0.001, median = 100) and height, 2.5 m (p < 0.001, median = 3) versus EAZA’s minimum recommended dimensions. Encouragingly, no significant difference in complexity was found between on and off exhibit housing, but the results suggest that being housed in a mixed species exhibit offers a more complex environment for callimico (W = 405.5, p < 0.005). The responses revealed overall good practice, although a disparity was noted in the provision of UV-B lighting and the prevalence of enrichment. Observational research focusing on spatial use, preference and behavior is recommended to complement husbandry guidelines. Reference of the survey findings to welfare indicators could determine the effect of current housing and husbandry on callimico welfare. Full article

China, the largest hog producer and consumer globally, has long experienced significant fluctuations in hog prices, partly due to the lack of rational expectations for future hog spot prices. However, on 8 January 2021, China’s first futures in animal husbandry, the live hog futures, were listed on the Dalian Commodity Exchange. To investigate the forecasting performance of the new live hog futures on forthcoming hog spot prices, we developed six futures-based forecasting models and utilized data on daily hog spot and futures prices from January 2021 to March 2023. Our results show that all six models consistently generate more accurate forecasts than the no-change model across six prediction horizons and four accuracy measures, indicating that China’s new live hog futures prices help forecast forthcoming hog spot prices. Among the futures-based forecasting models, futures spread-based models generally produce the best forecasts for one-, two-, three-, and four-month-ahead forecasting, while the simple linear regression using both spot and futures prices is the best for five- and six-month-ahead forecasting. Our results suggest that live hog futures are a promising and practical tool for various stakeholders in China’s hog industry to develop rational expectations for future hog spot prices. Full article

Measurement of zoo animal welfare states enables improvement to husbandry and management to be evidence-based and implemented according to species’ needs. Theoretical welfare concepts are often discussed, and whilst it is helpful to ensure wide consensus across all stakeholders on what welfare comprises, practical application of such evidence-based information is as equally important. All species housed in zoos will have specific needs that must be met by their housing, husbandry, and care to enable them to thrive. Therefore, this paper examined how to identify key animal care needs and an animal’s responses to them to form a basis for species-specific welfare assessment approaches. There are examples of familiar-to-the-zoo species that still pose challenges regarding delivery of optimal husbandry and management. As such, the identification and evaluation of core concepts of the biology, behaviour, “needs and wants” of these species is required to support validation and refinement of physical, behavioural, and psychological welfare measures. This article evaluated the use of evidence to build capacity in welfare measurement for a familiar zoo-housed species, the giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis, Linnaeus 1758), by outlining seven key needs and requirements that must be provided in the zoo (“giraffe W-E-L-F-A-R-E” = Warmth, Enrichment, Leaves, Feeding, Alfalfa, Rumination, Exercise). Provision of these inputs, and opportunities for all giraffes in a herd to engage with them, provides the foundation for further welfare assessment to be implemented. Specifically, the validation and measurement of mental states that are more likely to be positive if key behavioural and ecological needs have already been met. This paper advocated for this evidence-based approach to “welfare-focussed husbandry”, with distillation of key information that supports species-relevant care, to be developed for other zoo-housed species as support for their welfare assessment protocols. Such welfare-focussed husbandry is layered on top of the basic animal care requirements of the species in the zoo to ensure all individuals have the best opportunity to attain positive welfare states. In this way, and once validated, foundational welfare assessment can be easily completed by busy animal care staff, capacity is built into zoo operations as all stakeholders are aware of exactly what each species needs, and deeper dive welfare assessment (especially concerning animal mental states) can be targeted more effectively. Further evolution of these seven steps for the giraffe is suggested and extrapolation of this approach, to aid identification of key welfare indicators across all zoo-housed species, is encouraged. Full article

Human-directed aggression by domestic dogs is a major worldwide public health problem. The causes of aggression are complex, and research in this area often has to balance ecological validity with pragmatic controls; accordingly, it often does not meet the thresholds for quality typically used in reviews applying a classical “evidence-based” approach. Here, we propose a method of literature assessment that makes the “best use” of available evidence to identify and synthesise evidence relating to the most likely risk factors reported in the scientific literature. We used a systematic review process to initially identify relevant literature relating to potential early life experience (i.e., in the first six months of life) risk factors in the dog for human-directed aggression in the adult animal. Fourteen papers met our initial screening process and were subsequently analysed in detail, with data extracted and effect sizes calculated where possible. This highlighted the potential importance of the source of the animal, the age at which it was rehomed, the reason for the acquisition, the experience level of the owner, the animal’s socialisation experiences, the consistent husbandry and management practices, the training, the sex ratio of the litter and the history of dogs that display aggression in the pedigree as risk factors. Taken together, it seems that early experiences which limit the ability to develop effective coping strategies and routines may be particularly important. We provide guidance for the future standardised reporting of risk related to human-directed aggression by dogs to allow greater synthesis of the literature in the future. Full article

Giant Pacific octopuses (Enteroctopus dofleini) (GPOs) are commonly housed in zoos or aquaria, and sedation, anesthesia, and/or euthanasia may be indicated for a variety of reasons. Despite this need, evidence-based data on best practices is limited and focuses on smaller or more tropical species. The objectives of this study were to survey the aquatic community regarding the husbandry and veterinary care of GPOs, with a specific focus on anesthetic and euthanasia protocols. A two-part web-based survey was distributed to four aquatic and/or veterinary email listservs. Individuals from fifty-two institutions participated in phase one. Results documented that 40 (78 percent) participating institutions currently house GPOs, with most housing one and nine institutions housing two to three GPOs. The median (range) habitat volume is 5405 (1893–16,465) L, and 78 percent of systems are closed. Of the institutions surveyed, 23 have anesthetized or sedated a GPO for nonterminal procedures, including wound care, biopsies, and hemolymph collection. Reported methods of sedation or anesthesia include magnesium chloride, ethanol, isoflurane, tricaine methanesulfonate (MS-222), magnesium sulfate, benzocaine, and dexmedetomidine. Drugs or methods used for euthanasia include magnesium chloride, ethanol, mechanical decerebration, pentobarbital, isoflurane, MS-222, magnesium sulfate, benzocaine, potassium chloride, dexmedetomidine, and freezing. Reported observed side effects include ineffectiveness or inadequate sedation, inking, prolonged drug effects, and behavior changes. Survey data have the potential to guide the husbandry and veterinary care of GPOs and build the framework for future prospective studies on GPO sedation and anesthesia. Full article

The terms short-term, temporary, and transitional are related but can have different contexts and meanings for animal husbandry. The definitions and use of these terms can be pivotal to animal housing and welfare. We conducted three separate literature searches using Google Scholar for relevant reports regarding short-term, temporary, or transitional animal husbandry, and analysed key publications that stipulate relevant periods of accommodation. English Government guidance regarding acceptable short-term, temporary, or transitional accommodation for animals varies widely from <1 day to 3 months; whereas independent scientific criteria and guidance use typical periods of hours to several days. Stipulations regarding acceptable short-term, temporary, or transitional accommodation, notably among English Government guidance, which we focused on in this study, were highly inconsistent and lacked scientific rationale. The definitions and use of terms for both formal and other guidance should be limited to precautionary time frames within one circadian cycle, i.e., periods of <24 h. At ≥24 h, all animals at all facilities should be accommodated in conditions that are consistent with long-term housing, husbandry, and best practices. Full article

Nitrate is one of the most complicated forms of nitrogen found in aquatic surface systems, which results in the eutrophication of the water. During the last few decades, due to agriculture and animal husbandry activities, as well as urban development, a significant amount of pollutants have accumulated in the Jajrood river in northern Iran. In this research, we simulated nitrate load in a rural watershed to assess the outlet stream’s qualitative status and evaluate the influence of best management practices (BMPs). To accomplish this, we prepared, processed, and integrated different datasets, including land-use land-cover (LULC) maps, physiographic layers, and hydrological and agricultural datasets. In the modeling section, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was used to simulate nitrate load over 28 years (1991–2019). Additionally, the multi-objective optimization algorithm (MOPSO) was implemented to reduce the intended objective functions, including the number of best management practices and the nitrate concentration considering different scenarios. The calibration of the basin’s discharge and nitrate indicated that the SWAT model performed well in simulating the catchment’s streamflow (R² = 0.71) and nitrate (R² = 0.69). The recommended BMPs for reducing nutrient discharge from the basin are using vegetated filter strips on river banks and fertilizer reduction in agricultural activities. According to the results from this investigation, the integrated model demonstrates a strong ability to optimally determine the type, size, and location of BMPs in the watershed as long as the reduction criteria change. In a situation of water scarcity, the studies reported here could provide useful information for policymakers and planners to define water conservation policies and strategies. Full article

This novel qualitative study identifies challenges and opportunities to improve dog welfare in Ireland, as perceived by dog welfare organisations (DWOs), a previously underutilised stakeholder. This study sought the views of this predominantly voluntary sector of the next steps for policy and action in dog welfare, in light of the effects of the “puppy pandemic”, increased costs and COVID-19 restrictions. An integrated online focus group and interview design involving DWOs was analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Thematic analysis identified 2 key themes: (1) Key challenges and solutions in general dog welfare and (2) Challenges and opportunities in the welfare organisation sector. DWOs perceived poor public awareness of appropriate dog-husbandry, inadequate legislation enforcement, negative impact of puppy farms, and increased financial and volunteer burden. DWOs helped construct a best practice rehoming pathway, identified how overall standards could be improved and recommendations to enhance dog welfare. The DWOs perceived an increased numbers of households acquiring dogs, difficulties in rehoming, and financial challenges as threatening their viability as organisations and Irish dog welfare. Greater enforcement of legislation, greater communication between organisations and the government, and more media awareness were seen as helpful by the DWOs to improve dog welfare standards and their organisations. Full article