This study discusses scientific findings on the use of draught animals such as equids (i.e., horses, mules, and donkeys) and bovids (i.e., cattle and water buffaloes) in rural labours. Relevant peer-reviewed literature published between 1980 and 2021...
Teaming draught animals with modern forest machines may offer an innovative low-impact solution to biomass harvesting in protected areas. Machine traffic only occurs on pre-designated access corridors set 50 m apart, while trees are cut with chainsaw...
The Italian Heavy Draught Horse (IHDH) breed is selected based on linear type traits (LTT) evaluated at young age on six-month-old foals. However, animals retained for reproduction are scored also at adults age (about 30 months), and the evaluation i...
An abrupt-sunlight-reduction scenario combined with a catastrophic collapse of electricity/industry has the potential to disrupt food production and distribution worldwide, creating widespread food insecurity. This paper explores the potential of ani...
Our aims were to find a phenotypic variable to express mares’ lifetime reproductive performance after 6 breeding seasons (BS) in Italian Heavy Draught Horse breed (IHDH), and to estimate its heritability. At first, 1487 mares in a training data...
Across medieval Europe, cattle commanded a major, if shifting, economic and social value, and their use for meat, milk, and traction is well established. Although the changing roles of cattle throughout this period may have influenced relationships b...
Appropriate interventions to improve working equine welfare should be proposed according to scientific evidence that arises from different geo-cultural contexts. This study aims to assess and compare the welfare status of working horses in two admini...
Chronic progressive lymphedema (CPL) is a prevalent and progressive disease in Rhenish German draught horses. The objective of our follow-up study was to evaluate the heritability of this disease in Rhenish German draught horses using pedigree-based...
This study aimed to investigate the genetic diversity in the Italian Heavy Horse Breed from pedigree and genomic data. Pedigree information for 64,917 individuals were used to assess inbreeding level, effective population size (Ne), and effective num...
Research shows that working equids in low and middle-income countries play an essential role in supporting the livelihoods of their owners. The objective of the study was to provide the first description of the welfare status of working horses in Fij...
In the context of Africa’s farm labor scarcity, the use of mechanization is crucial for agricultural development. In Benin, technological advances, such as animal traction and motorization, are struggling to achieve the success expected by prod...
Deagrarianisation amongst smallholder farmers is a growing phenomenon globally, driven by a complex array of context-specific and higher-scale factors. Most research has focused on declines in arable cropping, with relatively little regard to the dea...
This review explicitly focuses on agricultural attachments and executing components that interact directly with soil and crops, rather than the tractor vehicle itself. Operating within complex and variable farmland media environments, the key compone...
The buffalo was domesticated around 3000–6000 years ago and has substantial economic significance as a meat, dairy, and draught animal. The buffalo has remained underutilized in terms of the development of a well-annotated and assembled reference gen...
Disorders of sex development (DSD) and reproduction are not uncommon among horses, though knowledge about their molecular causes is sparse. Here we characterized a ~200 kb homozygous deletion in chromosome 29 at 29.7–29.9 Mb. The region contain...
Bovine tuberculosis (bTB), caused by Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis), is a chronic zoonotic disease with buffaloes as maintenance hosts, yet global pooled prevalence of bTB in buffaloes has not been systematically quantified. This systematic review an...
Energy return on investment (EROI) is a ratio of the energy obtained in relation to the energy used to extract/produce it. The EROI of fossil fuels is globally decreasing. What do the declining EROIs of energy sources imply for society as a whole? We...
In the current study area, livestock are an integral part of the mixed farming system, and play very important roles as sources of draught power, nutrition, cash income, employment and poverty alleviation. However, feed shortage, especially during th...