Phenotypic characterisation of feeding behaviour in dairy goats

Les systèmes agricoles évoluent rapidement et sont soumis à des pressions sociétales et économiques croissantes. Un élément clé de leur adaptation consiste à trouver une combinaison optimale entre les capacités des animaux à s’adapter à des environnements changeants, le maintien des performances de production et un pilotage par l’éleveur qui valoriserait au mieux la variabilité individuelle. Le développement de l'élevage de précision, avec la capacité croissante d’enregistrement automatique des paramètres de comportement et de production, permet d'obtenir des informations précises sur le terrain en temps réel. Il est donc impératif que la pertinence biologique des variables mesurées soit connue. Dans ce contexte, le comportement alimentaire, qui constitue une part importante de la description de tout animal de production, est une variable d’intérêt.Cependant, en raison du manque d’études sur ce sujet, nous en savons peu sur le comportement alimentaire d’un individu et en particulier d’un ruminant, et sur ses facteurs de variation.Ce travail de thèse, réalisé chez la chèvre a montré que 1) les chèvres présentent des préférences en termes de position d’alimentation et de types d’aliments offerts, 2) une variabilité inter-individuelle importante du comportement alimentaire existe chez des chèvres hébergées en groupes, tandis que le profil de comportement alimentaire individuel est relativement stable entre les stades physiologiques, 3) lorsque les chèvres sont soumises à challenge alimentaire tel qu’une modification de la fréquence de distribution de la ration, elles adaptent leur comportement alimentaire à ces modifications, mais conservent un profil alimentaire stable.Agricultural systems are changing rapidly and are subject to increasing societal and economic pressures. A key element in their adaptation is to find an optimal combination between the ability of animals to adapt to changing environments, the maintenance of production performance and husbandry methods that would best support individual variability. The development of precision livestock farming, with the increasing ability to automatically record behavioural and production parameters, makes it possible to obtain accurate information on-farm in real time. It is therefore crucial that the biological relevance of the variables measured be known.However, due to the lack of studies on this subject, we know little about feeding behaviour of individual ruminants, and in particular goats, and what factors contribute to the individual variation.Using goats, work presented in thesis showed that 1) goats have preferences in terms of feeding posture and types of feed offered, 2) important inter-individual variability of feeding behaviour exists among goats housed in groups, while the individual feeding behaviour pattern is relatively stable over time, 3) when goats are subjected to feeding challenges such as changes in the frequency of feed delivery, they adapt their feeding behaviour to these changes, but keep a stable pattern of feeding behaviour

Caractérisation phénotypique du comportement alimentaire chez la chèvre laitière

Agricultural systems are changing rapidly and are subject to increasing societal and economic pressures. A key element in their adaptation is to find an optimal combination between the ability of animals to adapt to changing environments, the maintenance of production performance and husbandry methods that would best support individual variability. The development of precision livestock farming, with the increasing ability to automatically record behavioural and production parameters, makes it possible to obtain accurate information on-farm in real time. It is therefore crucial that the biological relevance of the variables measured be known.However, due to the lack of studies on this subject, we know little about feeding behaviour of individual ruminants, and in particular goats, and what factors contribute to the individual variation.Using goats, work presented in thesis showed that 1) goats have preferences in terms of feeding posture and types of feed offered, 2) important inter-individual variability of feeding behaviour exists among goats housed in groups, while the individual feeding behaviour pattern is relatively stable over time, 3) when goats are subjected to feeding challenges such as changes in the frequency of feed delivery, they adapt their feeding behaviour to these changes, but keep a stable pattern of feeding behaviour.Les systèmes agricoles évoluent rapidement et sont soumis à des pressions sociétales et économiques croissantes. Un élément clé de leur adaptation consiste à trouver une combinaison optimale entre les capacités des animaux à s’adapter à des environnements changeants, le maintien des performances de production et un pilotage par l’éleveur qui valoriserait au mieux la variabilité individuelle. Le développement de l'élevage de précision, avec la capacité croissante d’enregistrement automatique des paramètres de comportement et de production, permet d'obtenir des informations précises sur le terrain en temps réel. Il est donc impératif que la pertinence biologique des variables mesurées soit connue. Dans ce contexte, le comportement alimentaire, qui constitue une part importante de la description de tout animal de production, est une variable d’intérêt.Cependant, en raison du manque d’études sur ce sujet, nous en savons peu sur le comportement alimentaire d’un individu et en particulier d’un ruminant, et sur ses facteurs de variation.Ce travail de thèse, réalisé chez la chèvre a montré que 1) les chèvres présentent des préférences en termes de position d’alimentation et de types d’aliments offerts, 2) une variabilité inter-individuelle importante du comportement alimentaire existe chez des chèvres hébergées en groupes, tandis que le profil de comportement alimentaire individuel est relativement stable entre les stades physiologiques, 3) lorsque les chèvres sont soumises à challenge alimentaire tel qu’une modification de la fréquence de distribution de la ration, elles adaptent leur comportement alimentaire à ces modifications, mais conservent un profil alimentaire stable

Determination of Glyphosate and AMPA in Blood Can Predict the Severity of Acute Glyphosate Herbicide Poisoning

International audienceOBJECTIVE: To evaluate a potential association between blood and urine concentration of glyphosate and its metabolite, aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), with severity of acute glyphosate (herbicide) poisoning. METHODS: In our retrospective study of acute glyphosate poisoning, we examined records from the French National Database of Poisonings, dated between January 1, 2004, and December 31, 2016. We compared the severity of poisoning among case individuals using the Fisher exact test and Wilcoxon test. Also, we calculated ROC curves to determine the cutoff for blood and urine concentration. RESULTS: A total of 17 plasma glyphosate, 11 urine glyphosate, 13 plasma AMPA, and 10 urine AMPA specimens were included in our study, with collection dates ranging from January 1, 2004, through December 31, 2016. CONCLUSION: The optimal cutoff we discovered for blood concentration of AMPA was 0.88 mg/L; for glyphosate, it was 600 mg/L. The cutoff plasma concentration of AMPA has never been described in the literature, to our knowledge

Les chevreaux peuvent être phénotypés sur leur comportement alimentaire pré-sevrage

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Effet de la surface du sol sur le comportement de repos des chèvres laitières

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Goat kids can be characterized on their pre-weaning feeding behaviour

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Le distributeur automatique de lait : un dispositif permettant de caractériser le comportement alimentaire pré-sevrage des chevreaux

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Un indicateur acoustique inattendu d'émotions positives chez le cheval

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Individual differences in feeding behaviour of dairy goats

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An unexpected acoustic indicator of positive emotions in horses

International audienceIndicators of positive emotions are still scarce and many proposed behavioural markers have proven ambiguous. Studies established a link between acoustic signals and emitter's internal state, but few related to positive emotions and still fewer considered non-vocal sounds. One of them, the snort, is shared by several perrisodactyls and has been associated to positive contexts in these species. We hypothesized that this could be also the case in horses. In this species, there is a clear need for a thorough description of non-vocal acoustic signals (snorts, snores or blows are often used interchangeably) but overall this sound produced by nostrils during expiration has up to now been mostly considered as having a hygienic function. However, observations revealed that snorts were produced more in some individuals than in others, without relationship with air conditions. We observed 48 horses living in two "extreme" conditions: restricted conditions (single stall, low roughage diet) and naturalistic conditions (stable groups in pasture). The immediate place (e.g. stall/pasture) and the behavioural/postural (behaviour performed/ears positions) contexts of snort production were observed. We additionally performed an evaluation of the welfare state, using validated behavioural (e.g. stereotypies) and postural (e.g. overall ears positions) welfare indicators. The results show that 1) snort production was significantly associated with situations known to be positive for horses (e.g. feeding in pasture) and with a positive internal state (ears in forward or sidewards positions), 2) the riding school horses produced twice as many snorts when in pasture than in stall, 3) the naturalistic population emitted significantly more snorts than riding school ones in comparable contexts, 4) the frequency of snorts was negatively correlated with the composite total chronic stress score (TCSS, reflecting compromised welfare based on the horse's rank on the different indicators): the lower the TCSS, the higher the snort rate. Snorts therefore appear as reliable indicators of positive emotions