Quantifying environmental crime and the effectiveness of policy interventions is difficult because perpetrators typically conceal evidence. To prevent illegal uses of natural resources, such as poaching endangered species, governments have advocated granting policy flexibility to local authorities by liberalizing culling or hunting of large carnivores. We present the first quantitative evaluati...

Visibility computation is one of the fundamental problems in 3D computer graphics, and due to ever-increasing data-sets its relevance is likely to increase. One of the harder problems in visibility is occlusion culling, the process of removing objects that are hidden by other objects from the viewpoint. This paper gives an overview of occlusion culling algorithms and the data structures they op...

In 2009, dairy goat farms in the Netherlands were implicated in >2,300 cases of Q fever; in response, 51,820 small ruminants were culled. Among 517 culling workers, despite use of personal protective equipment, 17.5% seroconverted for antibodies to Coxiella burnetii. Vaccination of culling workers could be considered.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a disease of cattle first reported in 1986 in the UK [1], has been found in the cattle populations of most European countries. To date, Japan, Israel and Canada are the only nonEuropean countries where BSE has been reported in indigenous cattle [2]. Given all available evidence, the BSE agent is not transmitted horizontally between cattle; rather it is pr...

The objectives of this study were to determine by-parity nonproductive female days (NPD or NPDs) and mating and culling measurements, to determine correlations between by-parity NPDs, mating and culling measurements and herd productivity measurements, and to compare by-parity NPDs between three herd groups (105 herds) with differing reproductive productivities. NPD was defined as the number of ...

In this paper we present a computationally inexpensive way to perform Occlusion Culling in terrain scenes, modelled by elevation maps. The proposed method is based on virtual Occluders [Law99] (i.e. relatively simple structures, that are used to perform the actual visibility test). Unlike most of the related work, we did not seek for an accurate solution, but for a good conservative and inexpen...

We argue that the strategy of culling infected dogs is not the most efficient way to control zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis (ZVL) and that, in the presence of alternative control strategies with better potential results, official programs of compulsory culling adopted by some countries are inefficient and unethical. We base our arguments on a mathematical model for the study of control strateg...

A stratified survival analysis was compared with a non-stratified model to identify significant factors affecting the productive life of commercial sows and to estimate the heritability for sow productive life. Data for 3,074 sows were used for the survival analysis under a Cox model. The stratified model identified factors associated with sow survival that were not statistically significant in...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of vector control and elimination of infected dogs on the incidence of infection with Leishmania chagasi. A randomized community intervention trial was carried out in Teresina between 1995 and 1996. The area was divided in 34 blocks randomically allocated to 4 types of intervention: 1) spraying houses and animal pens with insecticide; 2) sp...