Rutter, S. M. 2010. Review: Grazing preferences in sheep and cattle: Implications for production, the environment and animal welfare. Can. J. Anim. Sci. 90: 285 293. The evolutionary and domestic ancestors of sheep and cattle will have evolved diet selection behaviours that enabled them to select a diet that met their individual nutrient requirements whilst minimising the risk of being killed t...

Dairy cow mortality causes financial loss and is increasing over time; it indicates suboptimal herd health or welfare. To describe the herd-level and contextual factors affecting cow mortality, the French National Bovine Dataset Identification was used to create dairy, beef, or fattening units within farms, for 2005 and 2006. Mortality rate (MO-RA, outcome variable) and most variables were calc...

Since the discovery of leptin secreted from adipocytes, specialized tissues and cells have been found that secrete the several peptides (or cytokines) that are characterized to negatively and positively regulate the metabolic process. Different types of adipokines, hepatokines, and myokines, which act as cytokines, are secreted from adipose, liver, and muscle tissue, respectively, and have been...

In Denmark, agriculture is the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions (81%), mainly from cattle (dairy and beef) farms. Whole-farm were quantified at nine Danish farms, using tracer gas dispersion method. Five to six measurement campaigns carried out each farm, covering a full year. Of seven home dairy cows two beef cattle. The farms represented typical breeds, housing management sys...

Objective- Locomotor disorders are prevalent health problems in dairy herds that negatively affect milk production, reproduction performance and animal welfare. The ultimate cost of locomotor disorders in dairy cattle is substantially greater than treatment costs alone. As limited information is available on incidence of feet and leg disorders in Iran, the objective of this study was to determi...

A retrospective epidemiological case-control study was performed in Karachi, Pakistan, from January to April 2013. The owners of 217 dairy cattle and buffalo farms from six different locations in Karachi were interviewed. The aim of the study was to identify risk factors associated with the presence of haemorrhagic septicaemia (HS). Farms with a history of at least one instance of sudden death ...

Improving feed efficiency in dairy cattle is a costly and complex challenge, due to the difficulty in measuring individual animal feed intakes and the need to consider energy demands for growth, lactation, maintenance, health, and fertility. Research projects are underway in several countries to provide genomic breeding values for dry matter intake or residual feed intake of dairy bulls based o...

Campylobacter jejuni, Campylobacter coli, and Arcobacter spp. were detected in feces of healthy dairy cows by highly specific multiplex-PCR assays. For C. jejuni, at this one-time sampling, cows from 80.6% of farm operations (n = 31) and 37.7% of individual dairy cattle fecal samples (n = 2,085) were positive. Farm management factors were correlated with prevalence in herds in which >25% of cow...

Meat animals are unique as experimental models for both lipid metabolism and adipocyte studies because of their direct economic value for animal production. This paper discusses the principles that regulate adipogenesis in major meat animals (beef cattle, dairy cattle, and pigs), the definition of adipose depot-specific regulation of lipid metabolism or adipogenesis, and introduces the potentia...

The onset of tetany, when dairy cattle have insufficient magnesium, has a huge impact both economically and on animal welfare. We have previously adapted a model of magnesium dynamics in sheep (Robson et al. 1997) for use with dairy cattle as an aid to understanding aspects of magnesium metabolism which influence the risk of animals contracting tetany (Bell et al. 2005). To estimate this risk i...