Behavioural and cortisol response of pigs and sheep during transport.

Furthermore, it made use of umbilical girth, which was difficult to measure in the donkeys. The equation of Eley and French (1993) for adult donkeys also consistently overestimated the liveweights of the Moroccan donkeys. Hard working donkeys, particularly in areas where the feed supply is irregular, are more likely to be in poor than in good body condition. Unfortunately Eley and French (1993) did not provide information on the liveweight or body condition of the animals they sampled. However, if, as is probable, their equation was produced from donkeys in good body condition, doing little work, it would be expected to overestimate the liveweight of donkeys in generally poorer condition, such as those in the present study. It is also likely that there were differences in the age distributions of the adult populations sampled to produce the prediction equations in the UK and Morocco, although it is doubtful whether they would have greatly influenced the effectiveness of the equation. Surveys of working donkeys in other Mediterranean countries (Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey) by the International Donkey Protection Trust (Bliss 1989, Svendsen 1991) have indicated that the average life span of a working donkey in these areas is rarely over 12 years. The age range of the sample of donkeys measured in the present study suggests that in Morocco too the life span of donkeys is short, in comparison with the average life span of British donkeys of 37 years reported by Bliss (1989) and of Zimbabwean donkeys of about 20 years (E. M. Nengomasha, personal communication). Although the equations derived in the present study for adult and young donkeys performed well on the data, this is to be expected because the equations were derived from measurements pertaining to those particular donkeys. The ultimate validation, therefore, must rest on testing other samples of working donkeys in other parts of the world. Acknowledgements. The authors are grateful for the financial support given by the International Donkey Protection Trust, and the British Overseas Development Administration, and the technical assistance of the Society for the Protection of Animals Abroad in Morocco, which made this work possible. They thank M. Bakkoury, A. Belemlih and A. Prentis for their assistance in Morocco, A. E. Hunter for statistical advice and P. R. Lawrence for making the nomogram.