STRESS IN FARMING: ANTICIPATE THE CONSEQUENCES

Stress has many, often very negative, impacts on your livestock. When an animal is subjected to a stressful situation, it will have to adapt its behaviour and metabolism, which will impact on its health and zootechnical performance. If you cannot eliminate it, you must protect the animal from its deleterious effects on your livestock.

• Stress cannot be treated!

The only way to treat stress is to use veterinary drugs. This method has been banned since 1 January 2006 and is no longer relevant, particularly because of antibiotic resistance. In the absence of curative treatments, it is essential to anticipate.

• Stress is contagious!

Indeed, if a stressed bird bites another, the latter will be stressed and will in turn bite another, and so on. The result is that a few individuals with deviant behaviour will become hundreds or even thousands of stressed chickens that will also start to show deviant behaviour. Thus, a few individuals with invisible stress can lead to catastrophic situations when they were in the minority to begin with. If we are unable to identify and treat these most fragile individuals, we must protect the whole flock and anticipate.

• There are solutions!

Preventing stress is therefore essential to avoid these catastrophic situations. Fortunately, several solutions exist to help you avoid this stress in your farms.

1. Ensure an optimal environment: however, some essential parameters cannot be controlled, especially during the confinement period. This strategy is therefore not optimal.
2. Train animals to environmental changes: although this strategy would be THE perfect strategy to prevent stress, it is far from being economically and practically feasible, as it is very time consuming.
3. VeO: Allow animals to adapt easily by reducing the perception of stress, so that events are perceived in a more positive way without changing the natural behaviour of the birds.

Reducing the individual consequences of stress for better overall results is what Phodé proposes with VeO, its "barrier gesture" to stress transmission.


https://elevage-planete.fr/stress-en-elevage-anticipez-les-consequences/