Physiological reaction and growth performance of buffalo and Friesian calves after recovery from heat stress

Abstract: Eight calves were used for this work, four Egyptian buffalo calves (BC) and four Friesians (FC) exposed to waves of severe heat stress (HS) were available for the present study. This study was carried out at the experimental farm belonging to Animal Physiology Research Laboratory, Animal Production Department, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt At the start of the experiment, the age of all animals was 20 months, while their body weight were 315.5±0.5 Kg for BC and
-343.0±12.9 Kg for FC. The main objective of the present work was to compare between the BC and FC after exposed to weaves of severe heat stress (recovering from heat stress), for thermophysiological response, hematological response, hormonal response, water intake (WI), feed intake (FI) and growth performance. The results obtained from this study could be summarized as follows to found no significant differences in respiration rate (RR) and rectal temperature (RT) between BC and FC except at 80 week of age at 14:00h. The RR values were higher in FC than BC at 08:00h and at 14:00h in all stages of experiments. The values of hematocrit (Ht), hemoglobin (Hb) and red blood cells count (RBCs) in general were lower for FC than BC. While, white blood cells count (WBCs) values were nearly for both species. The percentage between neutrophils / lymphocytes (Ne/LY) for BC and FC were no significant.
Triiodothyronine (T3) values were low for FC comparative with BC but thyroxine (T4) values were higher at all stages of excremental for FC comparative with BC. Generally, at any age BC had greater concentration of T3 and lower of T4 than FC. .
WI values were significantly higher in FC than BC at weeks 88, 90 and 94 of age at 08:00h, while concentrate intake values were significantly higher in FC than BC at weeks 88 and 94 of age.
BW values for FC were higher at all stages. The difference between FC and BC was almost stable during the experiment.
Keywords: Recovery, Growth, Hematology, T3, T4, Feed and water intake, Buffaloes, Friesian, calves, Heat stress.

Publication year

2011

Pages

87-94

Availability location

معهد بحوث الانتاج الحيوانى- شارع نادى الصيد- الدقى- الجيزة

Availability number

Organization Name

Animal Production Research Institute (APRI)

serial title

Proc. of the 4th Animal Wealth Research Conf. in the Middle East & North Africa Foreign Agricultural Relations (FAR), Egypt,

Author(s) from ARC