Foot-and-mouth is one of many diseases that affect farmed animals much worse than their wild relatives. Swine fever is another notable case - the CSF and ASF viruses are devastating in farmed pigs whereas the effects are fairly minimal on their free-ranging cousins. Wild animals have a range of ways in which they keep themselves healthy, and these have been succinctly reviewed by Cindy Engel in her study "Wild Health", see http://www.lovehealth.org/books/animal-healing.htm Can we tap into the disease-resistant aspects of a wild animal's lifestyle without getting into impractical or uneconomic solutions? Healthy Lifestyle for Farm Animals ---------------------------------- Disease outbreaks and disease prevention have always been a major financial worry for farmers, and the cost implications have spiralled upwards in recent years... There has always been the high cost of deaths, treatments, lowered productivity etc, but nowadays also we have to consider the additional costs of auditing drug-usage and storing and disposing of medicines and "clinical waste". There is also the increased cost nowadays of disposing of corpses, unused medicines and medication-contaminated products or market-ready stock. So, managing for disease resistance has become more and more important. At the same time, rising labour costs and consequential "efficiency drives" have pushed up the levels of boredom and frustration stress in many farm animals. For example, a wild pig will spend 75% of its day happily foraging for food, whereas a farmed pig will typically spend less than 2% of its day in acquiring food. An important emerging approach to reducing disease and physical damage is "Environmental Enrichment". Unfortunately EE has received some bad press in the farming community due to somewhat less than skilful attempts (especially by the European Union) to coerce livestock producers into adopting it on "welfare grounds". In this process of "coercion and resistance", the long-recognised and common-sense benefits of EE seem to have got lost. I was teaching EE to students as an aspect of basic stockmanship (now "stockperson") skills over 30 years ago, although we didn't use the fancy term "Environment Enrichment" then. I was just drawing on a long tradition of intuitive, "common-sense" and experiential stockperson skills. The plain fact is that bored and frustrated livestock, just like bored and frustrated kids, are prone to develop: a) antisocial behaviours (fighting, tail-biting, ear biting, navel-sucking, vent-pecking to name but a few). b) self-destructive behaviours (e.g. self-injurious stereotypies like bar-biting and stone-chewing) In addition, boredom, frustration and misery (depression) are also proven now to be bad news for the immune system and disease resistance in a variety of species. Breeding Animals ---------------- In breeding animals we also have to also consider the deleterious effect of stress on the ease and speed of birth and the consequential need for birth assistance and the impact on stillbirths. Farrowing pigs, for example, will happily engage in nesting behaviour during first stage labour if given bedding materials. Without them sows are restless. We now know clearly that in animals and in humans, feeling "in control", relaxed and "at home" greatly reduces birthing problems. Detection of oestrus and mating are another area where keeping animals relaxed and feeling safe pays dividends. Environmental Enrichment ------------------------ My renewed surge of interest in this topic has been fired by reading Prof. Robert Young's masterly treatise on environmental enrichment which has just been reprinted this month due to scarcity arising from the heavy demand since the launch in 2003. Professor Young's book is the most comprehensive one yet available on this topic. It covers both the scientific principles and practical implementation of environmental enrichment for pets and farm animals, also laboratory and zoo species. Details and a contents list are online at: http://www.pighealth.com/MEDIA/P/BOOKS/BEHAVBKS.HTM for anyone who is interested. Apart from anything else it has really made me think about enriching my own home and work environment! Wishing all forum members an enriched lifestyle! Michael Meredith