ADAPTATION STRATEGIES
The primary emphasis concerning animal response should centre on adaptation and management. When an animal is not acclimated or adapted, its physiological, behavioural, and metabolic reactions are likely to differ compared to when it is acclimated or fully adapted.
Therefore, within discussions on animal adaptation, it is crucial to acknowledge that an animal’s responses to specific stressors can evolve over time as it adjusts. However, it’s important to note that performance may not revert to pre-stress levels despite these adjustments (Bagath et al. 2019). So, it is necessary to build or improve the adaptive capacity of the animal through the implementation of certain adaptation strategies and policies that aim at:• Gaining a deeper understanding of how animals interact with their macro and micro climate.
• Understanding the interaction of climatic alterations with behavioural changes like pain, frustration, aggression, malaise, etc. and their responses on production traits.
• Understanding the mechanisms of climatic adaptation and stress tolerance of dairy cattle breeds reared in tropical countries.
• Identification of agro-ecological zone specific climate-resilient thermotolerant animals.
• Advancing the use of sequence data from phenom- ics, genomics, and transcriptomics technologies and the application of marker-assisted selection for traits related to adaptation.
• Integrating indigenous knowledge on cattle genetic diversity for locally adapted breeds via selective breeding.
• Enhancing feeding, housing, and selection criteria for improved animal breeding practices.
• Disseminating new insights to farmers for effective herd management against climatic stress.
• Implementing short and long-term climate adaptation policies for sustainable livestock development and resilience to climate change.
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