A tiny creature with a penchant for sucking out the brains of its prey is showing signs of a remarkable recovery from the brink of extinction on a remote West Australian reserve. The brush tailed mulgara, a small carnivorous marsupial, was once common across the arid regions of Australia but in the past quarter of […]
Continue ReadingThis study from the University of Padova, Padua, Italy, aimed at assessing the prevalence of poor rumen development, presence of rumen plaques, rumen papillae hyperkeratinization, and abomasal lesions in veal calves, and to investigate risk factors for their occurrence at the farm level. Within a wide cross-sectional study, a sample of 170 veal farms representative […]
Continue ReadingHip dysplasia is an important and complex genetic disease in dogs with both genetic and environmental influences. Since the osteoarthritis that develops is irreversible the only way to improve welfare, through reducing the prevalence, is through genetic selection. This study from the Kennel Club Genetics Centre at the Animal Health Trust, Newmarket, UK, aimed to […]
Continue ReadingIn farm animal practice, there is often a clear tension between animal welfare and the economic basis of food animal production. Animal well-being is regularly compromised by the stringencies of intensive animal husbandry. Conditions such as infectious keratoconjunctivitis or ocular squamous cell carcinoma, while having negative effects on animal welfare, also have profoundly deleterious effects […]
Continue ReadingIn a consignment of sheep brains from NZ, to be used in Europe as negative control material in scrapie rapid screening test evaluations, brain samples from 1 sheep (no. 1512) gave the following initially confusing results in various screening tests: the brainstem repeatedly produced negative results in 2 very similar screening kits (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay [ELISA]-1, […]
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