Effects of Heat Stress on Grazing Behaviour of Farm Animals’ as an Oral Presentation

In hot and humid climate, particularly under the intensive grazing system, farm animals encounters multifaceted problems viz., climatic influences, pasture type and condition, and grazing competition with co-inhabitants in the grassland. Farm animals first react to the environmental influences by changing their behavioral pattern in field, in order to avoid climatic stress. Sustainable production of livestock requires advanced planning of production management systems, with an understanding of negative animal responses that signal environmental stress and the ability to implement appropriate practices to ameliorate stress effects. With production systems located in many climate zones currently experiencing greater variation in climate extremes, an essential question becomes “How do we adapt our livestock production systems to meet the thermal challenges of current and future climates. In the pasture animal adopt foraging strategy by changing its ingestive behavior to meet nutrient requirement. Thus animals’ strategy of changing their behavior must be regarded as their adaptation. Grazing of forage generally provides the least expensive way of supplying nutrients to animals. Therefore, it is advantageous to develop a year round forage program which allows for as much grazing as possible every month of the year. However, good pasture management involves much more than simply turning the animals to pasture. The principles of grazing of goats are similar to those used for cattle. The primary goal is to have control of the animal's grazing pattern so that one can dictate the degree of defoliation and the frequency of defoliation. To obtain efficient animal production over a number of years, the needs of the plants as well as the needs of the animals must be taken into consideration. The objectives of this paper are to: define the thermal challenges that create negative animal responses during direct effect of solar radiation at grassland, to characterize those animal behaviors that they can be recognized and ameliorated.This study was supported by Scientific Research Fund of Cukurova University project number FAY-2015-3982