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The present investigation was carried out to study the effect of foot and mouth disease vaccination on seminal traits of 30 Holstein Friesian (HF) bulls, 3-5 years old, maintained at BAIF Central Research Station, Uruli Kanchan, Pune, India. The study period was from August to September 2013 and semen quality traits were evaluated on each bull maintained under identical feeding and management regimes. A total of 180 semen ejaculates were collected with one ejaculate from each bull at 3 days interval in a week at 15 days before, 15 and 30 days after FMD vaccination. Raksha Ovac vaccine of Indian Immunologicals Ltd. was used for vaccination purpose. Seminal traits like fresh and post thaw sperm motility, sperm concentration, semen volume, live and dead count, plasma membrane integrity were evaluated for all the ejaculates. Data on seminal traits were analysed by using one way ANOVA. Results revealed that vaccination had significant (P<0.05) effect on post thaw motility and highly significant (P<0.01) deleterious effect on HOS test, head and mid piece abnormalities; however no effect was noted on ejaculate volume, sperm concentration, initial motility, viability and tail abnormalities. The observations showed that vaccination alters the seminal traits of pure HF bulls.

Semen characteristics of 97,112 ejaculates from 399 adult bulls of 2 exotic breeds, 2 indigenous breeds and crossbred sub-populations with 50% and 75% of exotic inheritance, and of 3,293 ejaculates from 292 test bulls were analysed. The traits considered were: ejaculate volume, sperm concentration, total number of sperms, initial and post-thaw motility, and a theoretical number of doses produced from each given ejaculate. The objective was to measure the semen production potential of different genetic groups of cattle breeds, to identify factors affecting semen production and quality traits, and to assess the correlation between semen characteristics measure on test and adult bulls. A linear mixed model was used to evaluate the effect of different fixed and random effects. For adult bulls, the first ejaculate of a bull on a particular day and longer collection intervals lead to better characteristics for all the parameters but short collection interval with two ejaculate on particular day lead to a larger number of total semen doses produced without hampering semen quality. Repeatability estimates for semen traits were found to be low to moderate. Low to moderate and negative bull correlation was observed between concentration and volume in all the breed groups while the correlations of bull effects of the two motility traits were comparatively large. The moderate to high correlation for all semen traits between their testing and when they are adult highlights the importance of andrology evaluation in predicting future semen production of AI bulls in order to discard the less productive bulls.

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