The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that valuable on-farm outcome measures of broiler (meat) chicken welfare can be derived from optical flow statistics of flock movements recorded on video or CCTV inside commercial broiler houses. ‘Optical flow’ describes the velocity of imagemotion across an eye or camera and statistical patterns can be derived automatically and continuously thro...

The Barbarine sheep is generally managed within small interconnected herds. The goal of the present work is to investigate the effect of the mating management on genetic variability in a registered flock which starts showing a productivity falling, especially in lamb’s survival and this despite a practice of outbreeding. Pedigree data of 11 136 animals born between 1977 and 2007 were used to co...

Sheep are natural hosts of the prion disease, scrapie. They are also susceptible to experimental challenge with various scrapie strains and with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), which affects cattle and has been accidentally transmitted to a range of other species, including man. Incidence and incubation period of clinical disease in sheep following inoculation is controlled by the PRNP ...

Footrot causes 70-90% of lameness in sheep in Great Britain. With approximately 5% of 18 million adult sheep lame at any one time, it costs the UK sheep industry £24-84 million per year. The Gram-negative anaerobe Dichelobacter nodosus is the causative agent, with disease severity influenced by bacterial load, virulence, and climate. The aim of the current study was to characterize strains of D...

Flocking is an emergent behavior in which each individual agent follows a simple behavior rule that leads to a group behavior that appears cohesive and coordinated. In our work, we consider how to influence a flock using a set of ad hoc agents. Ad hoc agents are added to the flock and are able to influence the flock to adopt a desired behavior by acting as part of the flock. Specifically, we fi...

the number of lambs sold per ewe mated in the breeding flock has a considerable impact on sheep operation profitability. this depends primarily on fertility, prolificacy (# of lambs), and lamb survival, mothering ability, milk production of the ewe and lamb growth rate. optimal reproduction does vary by environment and management system – some sheep operations don’t want a lambing rate over 200...

In this paper we propose and prove correct a new self-stabilizing velocity agreement (flocking) algorithm for oblivious and asynchronous robot networks. Our algorithm allows a flock of uniform robots to follow a flock head emergent during the computation whatever its direction in plane. Robots are asynchronous, oblivious and do not share a common coordinate system. Our solution includes three m...