Targeting improved resilience in Merino sheep – Correlations between immune competence and health and fitness traits

Hine, Brad C.; Acton, Graham; Elks, Duncan; Niemeyer, Dominic; Bell, Amy; Colditz, Ian G.; Ingham, Aaron; Smith, Jennifer L.

doi:10.1016/j.animal.2022.100544

Cited by 14 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Resilience has been assessed in the literature using phenotypic indicators. Hine et al [ 90 ], while studying the immune response of merino sheep, suggested that selecting for immune competence is feasible and is expected to improve their resilience by enhancing their ability to cope with various disease challenges. Nevertheless, selective breeding also tends to implicate negative as well as positive welfare aspects, and proposals are being made on how to breed efficiently for such desired positive traits [ 91 , 92 ].…”

Section: Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Positive Aspects of Welfare in Sheep: Current Debates and Future Opportunities

Muhammad

Stokes

Manning

2022

Animals

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The concept of positive welfare is an expansion of the traditional understanding that animal welfare is defined by minimizing stress, pain, suffering, and disease. Positive welfare shifts the animal welfare narrative from a focus on reducing negative experiences to proactively providing animals with opportunities to have positive experiences and feelings. The concept, although around for several decades, is in its infancy in terms of developing ways of assessing positive welfare on farms, especially in extensive systems, and there are challenges in the adoption of positive welfare practices and the monitoring of continuous improvement at the farm level. Using an iterative approach, this critical review aims to explore the extent to which positive welfare interventions and indicators are positioned and have been developed within the animal welfare literature for sheep. This paper critiques existing positive welfare indicators, such as choices in food and the physical environment, conspecific social synchronization, maternal bonds, intergenerational knowledge transfer, positive human–animal relationships, etc., as currently assessed by the ‘good life framework’. It also reviews the characteristics of scientific measures for (positive) affective states in the current sheep literature and their potential contribution to understanding positive welfare states in sheep. In conclusion, this paper provides recommendations for future research regarding sheep welfare.

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Section: Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Positive Aspects of Welfare in Sheep: Current Debates and Future Opportunities

Muhammad

Stokes

Manning

2022

Animals

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“…Using a measure of the capacity of beef steer calves to mount an immune response to vaccination during the stress of weaning while confined in outdoor cattle yards, Hine et al (2021) found a favourable association between high immune competence and low mortality during subsequent finishing in a commercial feedlot. Immune competence measured during the stress of yard weaning in lambs was favourably genetically correlated with the incidence of fly strike, faecal soiling of the breech (dag score), faecal worm egg count, and a composite fitness measure (Hine et al 2022). Deviations from normality in average eating time, daily ear temperature dynamics and daily behavioural activity in late pregnancy were predictive of a suite of health deficits in early lactation in dairy cows (van Dixhoorn et al 2018).…”

Section: Consequences Of Resiliencementioning

confidence: 98%

“…Second, an alternative approach to assessing resilience was used by Hine and colleagues (Aleri et al 2019;Hine et al 2019Hine et al , 2021Hine et al , 2022. These authors measured the strength of the immune response during the stress of routine husbandry practises such as weaning of beef calves and lambs bred and raised in a pasture-based production system.…”

Section: Measuring Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These authors measured the strength of the immune response during the stress of routine husbandry practises such as weaning of beef calves and lambs bred and raised in a pasture-based production system. This approach measures the absolute level of performance of the immune system, termed immune competence, under stress rather than characteristics of response kinetics (Hine et al 2019(Hine et al , 2022 and complements a large body of work on associations between immune competence and disease outcomes in livestock (for reviews, see Wilkie and Mallard 1999;Hine et al 2015;Mallard et al 2015;König and May 2019;Bai and Plastow 2022). Immune competence measured in dairy heifers during routine husbandry is negatively correlated with cortisol responses (Aleri et al 2019) and thus immune competence may be an indicator of resilience.…”

Section: Measuring Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Competence to thrive: resilience as an indicator of positive health and positive welfare in animals

Colditz

2022

Anim. Prod. Sci.

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A capacity for an animal to maintain or regain healthy functioning in the face of environmental disturbances is recognised as resilience. For the individual animal, dynamic properties of the trajectory of performance traits (e.g. daily milk yield), periodicity of physiological and behavioural variables (e.g. body temperature) and complexity of biological functions (e.g. behavioural repertoire) can provide indicators of its resilience. These indicators provide a view of the individual's attempts to cope physically (and emotionally) with its non-shared micro-environment. The concept of resilience is examined as a multifaceted attribute that is hidden from direct measurement. The challenges for establishing relationships between general resilience and context-specific resilience such as disease resilience are explored by comparison with the multifaceted construct of temperament (personality). Lower variance in deviations from performance trajectories and stronger periodicity in rhythmic physiological and behavioural variables are mostly heritable and favourably associated with health and longevity. In humans, wellbeing is associated with health outcomes, and biomarkers of health are more strongly associated with eudaimonic than hedonic wellbeing. The psychological state of eudaimonia is associated with the capacity to express agency, function well, fulfill biological potential and express environmental mastery. The need for indicators of eudaimonia in animals has been suggested previously. Links between environmental mastery and the capacity to develop and express physiological, immune, behavioural, cognitive and affective competencies are examined. It is suggested that longitudinal data on individual animals can provide a precision physical indicator of eudaimonic positive welfare. In this view, positive welfare entails both eudaimonic and hedonic aspects of wellbeing, neither of which is alone sufficient to describe or to maximise positive welfare. Cumulative scores of resilience may have utility for assessing the lifetime welfare experience of the individual and when summed at the farm level may provide a metric for benchmarking welfare performance. Breeding for resilience selects for normativity of biological functions assessed against the individual animal's own baseline of inherited and developmentally acquired potential. This differs from current approaches to selection for production, which aim to maximise production or production efficiency benchmarked against the group mean. Biological costs and trade-offs for resilience require further research.

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“…So, it is possible to identifying and selectively breeding livestock with an inherent ability to make superior immune responses that can reduce disease occurrence (Thompson-Crispi et al, 2014). Healthier animals also may be expected to demonstrate improvements in other traits, including reproductive fitness and growth (Mallard & Wilkie, 2007;Thompson-Crispi et al, 2012;Hine et al, 2014;Aleri et al, 2015).…”

Section: Animal Disease Resistance and Adaptation Improvementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review on Animal Diseases Resistance and Adaptation Improvement through Molecular Genetics

Bekele¹

2022

IJALSR

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This review is conducted to highlight the application of molecular genetics for improvement of diseases resistance in livestock. Diseases prevention is a serious issue to restrict economic damage due to economically important diseases outbreaks worldwide. Over the last decades, the excessive use of drugs has been criticised because of the possible development of drug-resistant zoonotic organisms and the potential dangers of drug residues in food animal products for human consumption. To prevent this problem following the ways for host resistance improvement to disease is a low cost and sustainable approach. So, this literature review was done on the theory of how to use molecular markers to select for quantitative trait loci (QTL) in genetic improvement programs, both within populations and for introgression of QTL from one population to another. If the effect of each marker is known, then an animal with no available phenotype for disease can be genotyped and its direct genomic value can be estimated based on its genotype only. The advantage of such a method is that accurate estimates of genetic merit can be achieved exploiting knowledge of the genotype of the animal even if the animal is very young. So, it is possible to put recommendation for further research on the generation of phenotypes that are resistant to diseases and development accurate bio-markers that can be readily measured in large numbers of animals at a relatively low cost.

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Targeting improved resilience in Merino sheep – Correlations between immune competence and health and fitness traits

Cited by 14 publications

References 23 publications

Positive Aspects of Welfare in Sheep: Current Debates and Future Opportunities

Positive Aspects of Welfare in Sheep: Current Debates and Future Opportunities

Competence to thrive: resilience as an indicator of positive health and positive welfare in animals

Review on Animal Diseases Resistance and Adaptation Improvement through Molecular Genetics

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