Animal welfare concerns are becoming a central issue in wildlife management and conservation. Thus, we investigated stress response of wild ungulates to potentially traumatic situations (shooting injuries, vehicle collisions, entanglement, injuries or diseases) and hunting methods (stalking, battues and hunts with dogs) by means of serum cortisol concentrations from blood collected from killed animals. Cortisol levels in roe deer ranged below and in wild boar above levels for moose, red deer and fallow deer (hence, pooled as a group Bdeer^). Apart from species, cortisol concentration in trauma situations was mainly explained by trauma type and presence of disturbance after the trauma event. Effect of trauma type differed significantly for Bdeer^, with animals caught in fences and suffering vehicle collisions experiencing higher cortisol levels than animals injured by shooting. Differences between hunting methods were observed in the cervids (Bdeer^and roe deer), with stalking leading to lower cortisol levels than hunts with dogs (both groups) and battues (roe deer). Events both before and after the shot, such as duration of pursuit prior to shooting, location of injury, trauma length and presence of disturbance after the shot were relevant for cortisol levels in hunted cervids. Our results indicate that search teams tracking and euthanising wounded animals should behave in a calm way to minimise disturbance. Still, it is important to acknowledge that many situations described in the literature, i.e. reindeer handling, roe deer captures and red deer yarding, seem even more stressful, beside vehicle collisions, than most hunting methods.

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Between 2001 and 2003, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis in a Swedish zoo which involved elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses and buffaloes. Cultures of trunk lavages were used to detect infected elephants, tuberculin testing was used in the giraffes and buffaloes, and tracheal lavage and tuberculin testing were used in the rhinoceroses. The bacteria isolated were investigated by spoligotyping and restriction fragment length polymorphism. Five elephants and one giraffe were found to have been infected by four different strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

prompted a great deal of work on the hearing of aquatic and semi-aquatic mammalian species (Au et al., 2000;Wartzok and Ketten, 1999;Richardson et al., 1995;Tyack et al., 2006;Nachtigall et al., 2005). The polar bear Ursus maritimus is the only bear species classified as a marine mammal (Rice, 1998), but there has been no audiometric examination of their hearing. According to the most comprehensive review of animal hearing studies (Fay, 1988), and a search of the literature published since, in fact no measurements have been completed on the hearing of any bear.One way to estimate the hearing of a species is to examine the calls of its prey and its response to those calls. Ringed seals Phoca hispida and bearded seals Erignathus barbatus are prominent in the diet of polar bears (Stirling, 2002). In some areas, the predator-prey relationship between ringed seals and polar bears is so interrelated that a count of the population of one of them can indicate the population level of the other (Stirling and Øritsland, 1995). Polar bears' preferred prey items are the newborn pups and subadults (Stirling and McEwan, 1975), and they primarily hunt seals in areas of moving pack ice, which include known important locations of seal birth lairs (Smith, 1980). Four types of vocalizations made by ringed seals can be heard at all times of day in the Arctic spring: (1) low-pitched barks, (2) high pitched yelps, (3) low and high pitched growls and (4) short descending chirps (Stirling, 1973). Sonograms of the recorded sounds indicated that most of the energy was relatively low frequency below 2·kHz, with some harmonics up to 8·kHz.The behavioral responses of polar bears to the calls of ringed seals recorded under water and then presented to the bears in air were measured (Cushing et al., 1988), and elicited similar responses from two recently captured bears. The bears erected their ears, lifted their heads, visually scanned the room and then began sniffing. As the ringed seal calls continued to be played the bears became active, paced their cage, groaned and chuffed, then pawed and chewed at their cage bars. All of these behaviors were observed only rarely in the baseline behavioral examinations prior to the presentation of ringed seal sounds, indicating that the bears responded to their primary prey's underwater vocalizations, presented in air, in a manner that indicated some importance of in-air hearing in detecting and locating their under-ice prey. Cushing's observations suggest that if polar bears could hear the underwater vocalizations of the ringed seals they might use seal vocalizations as a method to locate their favorite prey. It has also been noted (Stirling and Thomas, 2003) that the distinct trills of bearded seals might also provide a prominent cue for polar bear localization of these animals. A While there has been recent concern about the effects of sound on marine mammals, including polar bears, there are no data available measuring the hearing of any bear. The in-air hearing of three polar bears was measured using ...

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