The expansion of export demand for sheep meats has led to a resurgance of interest by producers in short term feedlot systems of fattening for sheep and lambs. Apart from the cost of rations, the incidence of disease and metabolic disorders is an important determinant of profitability. This paper describes a feedlot experiment at Hamilton during which an outbreak of polioencephalomalacia (PEM) ...

Castration of male animal's leads to a reduction in aggressive behavior, which animals will avoid wasting energy resulting to economic production of the animal, grows. It also reduces damage and bruising animals and increases normed meat producing at slaughter. In this study, 20 lambs Ghezel breed in four age groups, group 1: one month (n = 4), group 2: two months (n = 4) Group 3: three months ...

Lambs were assigned to a 2x2 factorial design with corn or barley fed either whole or rolled. Hay was fed for ad libitum intake while concentrates were fed in similar amounts. Dry matter intake of hay, ADG, the gain:feed ratio, and warm carcass weight (WCW) were higher (P<0.05) for lambs fed corn than for those fed barley. Cereal processing had no effect (P>0.05) on hay dry matter intake, ADG, ...

Seventy-nine to ninety-three percent of 49 young lambs less than 3 months old, which were too small to go to the meat works at the time of the first draft, showed sub-clinical lesions of enzootic pneumonia when examined post-mortem. Later samples from the same population showedthat some, but not all, lambs developed pleurisy. During the months that the lambs were growing and fattening, the prev...

The study was conducted on 20 Polish Merino ram-lambs divided into two groups: experimental (E) and control (C), each of 10 animals. From birth all the lambs were maintained with their dams and then weaned at the age of 8 weeks, placed in individual straw-bedded pens and fattened individually with a granulated concentrate mixture until reaching a mean body weight of 31.8 kg. During fattening ea...

Factors regulating the differentiation of sheep subcutaneous and abdominal (omental or perirenal) preadipocytes from foetal lambs, suckling lambs and fattening sheep have been investigated using a serum-free cell culture system. Differentiation was assessed by changes in the activity of the enzyme glycerol 3-phosphate dehydrogenase. Insulin or IGF-I was essential for differentiation. Dexamethas...

Diets with low forage concentration may depress feed intake and average daily gain, while diets with high forage concentration may limit feed intake due to rumen filling. Adequate forage level may range from 7% to 14% in ration for feedlot lambs, depending on forage source and ingredient composition. Small amounts of good quality forage may improve growth performance of sheep in the first stage...

Forty growing ram lambs (Lori-Bakhtiari breed) averaging 28 kg (±1.5) were allocated in this study to evaluate the optimal dietary energy density in a lamb fattening enterprise in Iran. The feed intake (FI), body weight (BW), gain to feed ratio (G:F) and carcass characteristics were studied. Four treatments differed in metabolizable energy content (ME) as follow; 2, 2.3, 2.6 and 2.9 Mcal/kg for...

Twenty-seven lambs were used to investigate the effects of the inclusion of 4% hydrogenated palm oil (HPO) or sunflower oil (SFO) in the concentrate on animal performance, carcass and meat quality and fat characteristics and fatty acid composition. Animals (16.2±0.27kg initial weight) were fed concentrate (Control, HPO or SFO) and barley straw ad libitum and slaughtered at 25kg. SFO lambs tende...

This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of feeding treated wheat straw with urea and whey on fattening lambs performance. About 4.5 kg urea and 1.5 kg salt were dissolved in 40 L water and mixed with 30 L of whey. The solution was spread over 100 kg chopped wheat straw. Thirty two male lambs were randomly divided into four feeding groups to compare performance with diets based on barley...