The welfare consequences of long-distance transportation of animals remain a controversial topic. Animals that stand for most of the long journey (especially if additional muscular activity is required to deal with postural instability) are at risk of developing fatigue. Previous observational studies of behaviour and physiology suggested either that sheep do not become markedly fatigued by lon...

Lungworms are important parasites of wildlife and host infection status is often evaluated using coprologic techniques, most commonly the Baermann method. Recently, the FLOTAC® has emerged as a new tool for diagnosing lungworm infections, and methodologic comparison studies in domestic species suggest that this method outperforms many other established techniques. We compared a modified FLOTAC ...

Understanding the factors shaping the dynamics of carnivore-livestock conflicts is vital to facilitate large carnivore conservation in multi-use landscapes. We investigated how the density of their main wild prey, roe deer Capreolus capreolus, modulates individual Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx kill rates on free-ranging domestic sheep Ovis aries across a range of sheep and roe deer densities. Lynx ki...

BACKGROUND The rates of congenital disorders in Swiss sheep were determined by a questionnaire which was sent to 3,183 members of the Swiss Sheep Breeders' Association. FINDINGS A total of 993 questionnaires were returned, giving a response rate of 31.2%. Of these, 862 questionnaires originated from farms keeping one of the predominant Swiss sheep breeds: Swiss White Alpine sheep, Brown-Heade...

Brucellosis is an economically important disease worldwide. Bangladesh has been reported an endemic area for brucellosis. The occurrence of brucellosis in people and the distribution of the disease among the livestock to be spatially related. A survey of brucellosis was carried out in sheep of Netrakona and Mymensingh districts of Bangladesh. A total number 102 blood samples were collected from...

To elucidate the controversial systematic relationship of blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur) and endangered dwarf blue sheep, we sequenced part of the mtDNA control region and Y-linked ZFY intron, and carried out phylogenetic analyses. Mitochondrial results revealed that the dwarf blue sheep is a strongly supported monophyletic group, with an average of 12.21% sequence divergence from the blue sheep....

Sheep are one of the most studied farm species in terms of their ability to process information from faces, but little is known about their face-based emotion recognition abilities. We investigated (a) whether sheep could use images of sheep faces taken in situation of varying valence as cues in a simultaneous discrimination task and (b) whether the valence of the situation affects their learni...

Chinese indigenous sheep can be classified into three types based on tail morphology: fat-tailed, fat-rumped, and thin-tailed sheep, of which the typical breeds are large-tailed Han sheep, Altay sheep, and Tibetan sheep, respectively. To unravel the genetic mechanisms underlying the phenotypic differences among Chinese indigenous sheep with tails of three different types, we used ovine high-den...

BACKGROUND Sheep scrapie is caused by multiple prion strains, which have been classified on the basis of their biological characteristics in inbred mice. The heterogeneity of natural scrapie prions in individual sheep and in sheep flocks has not been clearly defined. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS In this study, we intravenously injected 2 sheep (Suffolk and Corriedale) with material from a n...