Management Approaches to Reduce Livestock Losses from Poisonous Plants on Rangeland

Risk management to reduce livestock losses from toxic plants

Risk of livestock losses to poisonous plants can be reduced on many ranges through prudent management based on application of existing knowledge. Poisonous plants can be categorized using both acceptability to livestock and a plant's toxic potential. Acceptability encompasses forage qualities such as taste and chemistry (i.e., nutrient and toxin concentrations) and postingestive feedback from a...

Continued food aversion: Training livestock to avoid eating poisonous plants

Animals can be trained to avoid eating specific foods by offering them the food and subsequently administering an emtic to induce nausea. The animal associates the taste of the food with the induced illness and subsequently avoids eating that food. Conditioned food aversion (CFA) is a potential tool to prevent livestock poisoning from palatable and abundant poisonous plants. Cattle have been tr...

Poisonous plants.

South Africa is blessed with one of the richest floras in the world, which--not surprisingly--includes many poisonous plants. Theiler in the founding years believed that plants could be involved in the aetiologies of many of the then unexplained conditions of stock, such as gousiekte and geeldikkop. His subsequent investigations of plant poisonings largely laid the foundation for the future Sec...

Poisonous plants.

Some Common Poisonous Plants