An energy system is described in which, in both single-stomached and ruminant animals, the heat increment of feeding is considered to be linearly related to five measurable quantities. For both kinds of animals three of the quantities, with their heat increments in parentheses, are urinary N (wu; kJ/g), faecal organic matter (wd; kJ/g) and positive protein retention (wp; kJ/g). In ruminants the...

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and chronic wasting disease (CWD) of deer and elk are a threat to agriculture and natural resources, as well as a human health concern. Both diseases are transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), or prion diseases, caused by autocatalytic conversion of endogenously encoded prion protein (PrP) to an abnormal, neurotoxic conformation designated PrPsc....

Background Ruminant dung is a highly ephemeral, patchily distributed resource, which is utilized by a diverse community of invertebrate species. This ecologically important community may be affected adversely by insecticide and endectocide residues in the faeces of treated cattle. The aim of the present work was to quantify the aggregation of the insects colonising cow-dung in cattle pastures a...