Resilient capacity of cattle to environmental challenges – An updated review

• Autor(a) principal: Madhusoodan, Aradotlu Parameshwarappa
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Sejian, Veerasamy, Rashamol, Veettiparambil Pandarathil, Savitha, Sira Tulasiramu, Bagath, Madiajagan, Krishnan, Govindan, Bhatta, Raghavendra
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Journal of Animal Behaviour and Biometeorology
• Texto Completo: https://malque.pub/ojs/index.php/jabb/article/view/913
• topic: adaptation; cattle; climate; heat stress; thermo-tolerance

Livestock rearing plays an integral role in enabling small and marginal farmers to ensure their livelihood security, which prevents both the food insecurity and poverty.  Among the livestock, large ruminants and in particular cattle plays a significant role from economic perspectives. This review is an attempt to compile information pertaining to thermo-tolerance of cattle to heat stress challenges. Heat stress has serious consequences, which negatively influence cattle production causing severe economic burden to the cattle farmers. The ability of the cattle to perform normal biological functions in various adverse environmental conditions denotes its resilient capacity. The resilience capacity is determined by various traits which govern maintaining their body conformation, respiratory and cutaneous evaporative cooling mechanisms, hair coat, maintenance of metabolic rate, feed efficiency, tolerance to dehydration, production maintenance and reproductive efficiency. Breed differences were established for climate resilience and the superiority of indigenous breeds over exotic animals were established in this aspect. The resilience capacity of indigenous cattle based on changes associated with both phenotypic and genotypic traits were reviewed and several biological markers, which reflect the ability of cattle to survive in different climatic conditions, were highlighted. The significance of refining the existing breed program for imparting climate resilience was projected to identify breeds, which have the ability to survive in different agro-ecological zones.