Organic sheep and goat farming is on the rise in Germany and the EU. Many consumers see organic farms as an example of the "intact world" of farming and rural living. Agrienvironmental schemes support conversion from conventional towards organic farming. Only few know how difficult organic sheep and goat farming is from animal welfare, ecological and economic perspective. Newcomers particularly...

Sheep and goat breeds are selected worldwide for meat, wool, and dairy production, and breeding objectives also include other functional traits such as reproductive performance and disease resistance. In early 2007, the development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) allowed de novo sequencing of sheep (Jiang et al., 2014) and goat genomes (Dong et al., 2013). In turn, it offered an opportunity...

Scrapie is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease of sheep and goats. It is also the earliest known member in the family of diseases classified as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) or prion diseases, which includes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and chronic wasting disease in cervids. The recent revelation of naturally occurring BSE in a g...

Abstract In northern Europe, the first indications of a Neolithic lifestyle appear around 4000 cal BC from Germany up to middle Sweden and south-eastern Norway in an apparently short period time, largely carried by immigrant populations bringing new species plants animals into region. However, nature this domestication “package” is not everywhere same, whereby both environmental cultural filter...

The organisation of the domestic bovid genomes is very similar, thus ovine and caprine genome mapping may benefit from the most advanced bovine map. At present, there have been identified over 2000 markers in the sheep and over 700 in the goat. Recently, several spectacular examples of the genome map application for the identification of loci controlling important traits have been reported, for...

tenderness is the single most important factor influencing consumer acceptance of meat. the calpain proteolytic system is known to be responsible for the post-mortem tenderization of meat. the purpose of this study was to determine and compare the tensile strength and total calpain activities in different muscles of camel, cattle, sheep and goat. in camels, the effect of age and sex of animal w...

background toxoplasmosis is a widespread disease in humans and many other species of warm-blooded animals. among livestock animals, sheep and goat are more widely infected by toxoplasma gondii. this parasite is a major cause of abortion, with significant economic losses for sheep and goat breeders. objectives the polymerase chain reaction (pcr) method was employed to detect of the t. gondii dna...

The placenta of domestic sheep plays a key role in horizontal transmission of classical scrapie. Domestic goats are frequently raised with sheep and are susceptible to classical scrapie, yet potential routes of transmission from goats to sheep are not fully defined. Sparse accumulation of disease-associated prion protein in cotyledons casts doubt about the role of the goat's placenta. Thus, rel...

Orf virus (ORFV), a species of the genus Parapoxvirus of the family Poxviridae, causes non-systemic, highly contagious, and eruptive disease in sheep, goat, and other wild and domestic ruminants. Our previous work shows orf to be ubiquitous in the Fujian Province of China, a region where there is considerable heterogeneity among ORFVs. In this study, we sequenced full genomes of four Fujian goa...

to reach the desirable ecosystem management, determining the animal dietselection, which is one of the components of rangeland ecosystem, is important. therefore, inorder to determine the grazing behavior and diet selection of sheep and goat, the uplandrangeland of northern part of alborz was selected. in this study, the first weeks of july andaugust of 2009 were chosen for the grazing period o...