Key findings The results show that 77.4% of respondents rear an average of 2.97 livestock unit (LSU) per household. More than half of respondents who rear livestock (53.82%) dump livestock carcasses in the open fields. Ethnicity, age, education status, gender, livestock unit and involvement in conservation activities are the most significant predictors for the positive attitudes towards vulture...

This paper addresses the context of decisions about the application of biotechnology in livestock agriculture. It specifically addresses the role of transgenic livestock in agriculture. Key innovations in livestock genetics and reproductive technology in the last century have laid the foundations upon which genetic engineering can be applied to livestock in the post-genomics era. Transgenesis i...

PREFACE This is the 8 th of a series of working papers prepared for the IGAD Livestock Policy Initiative (LPI). The IGAD Livestock Policy Initiative has been established by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in collaboration with FAO and with the financial support of the European Commission and its main objective is to enhance the contribution of the livestock sector to susta...

SUMMARY Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was an increase in the number of cases of human echinococcosis recorded throughout central Asia. Between 1991 and 2001 incidence rates of cystic echinococcosis (CE) increased by 4 fold or more. There also appeared to be increases in prevalence of CE in livestock and prevalences of Echinococcus granulosus reported in dogs. The inc...

Parasitic nematodes represent one of the most pervasive and significant challenges to grazing livestock, and their intensity and distribution are strongly influenced by climate. Parasite levels and species composition have already shifted under climate change, with nematode parasite intensity frequently low in newly colonized areas, but sudden large-scale outbreaks are becoming increasingly com...

A key risk factor for climate change is the growth in the human population, projected to be about 35 per cent between 2006 and 2050. In the same period the FAO projects that the number of livestock worldwide will double, as will their emissions, while it is widely expected that emissions from other industries will drop, they say. “This would make the amount of livestock-related emissions even m...

Woody-herbaceous-livestock species interactions have attracted a great deal of research attention due to global land cover changes and increasing livestock production systems around the world. It has been well recognized that many local and regional factors, physical and biological, influence the interaction between woody and herbaceous species. While impacting the dynamics, and tipping the bal...

ABOUT LADDER LADDER is a research project funded by the Policy Research Programme of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) that seeks to identify alternative routes by which the rural poor can climb out of poverty. LADDER is working with nearly 40 villages and 1,200 households in Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Kenya to discover the blocking and enabling agencies in the institutio...

Burrowing small mammals in grasslands have long been regarded as pests because they compete for forage with livestock and reduce the forage availability for livestock by destroying pastures through their intensive digging activity. In order to investigate forage competition between the Mongolian Pika (Ochotona pallasi) and livestock an exclosure experiment consisting of four different treatment...

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in the number of livestock QTL mapping studies. The next challenge awaiting livestock geneticists is to determine the actual genes responsible for variation of economically important traits. With the advent of high density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) maps, it may be possible to fine map genes by exploiting linkage disequilibrium between gene...