Dairy Herd Health
Currently we are in the second decade of the 21st century and there is considerable interest and concern over how we will feed the world’s population in the next 40 years. Difficult choices will be made about which food products we consume and how we produce them. It appears that the demand fo...
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Những tác giả chính: | , , , , , , , , |
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Định dạng: | Sách |
Ngôn ngữ: | English |
Được phát hành: |
CABI
2014
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Những chủ đề: | |
Truy cập trực tuyến: | https://scholar.dlu.edu.vn/thuvienso/handle/DLU123456789/37161 |
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Thư viện lưu trữ: | Thư viện Trường Đại học Đà Lạt |
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Tóm tắt: | Currently we are in the second decade of the 21st century and there is considerable interest
and concern over how we will feed the world’s population in the next 40 years. Difficult
choices will be made about which food products we consume and how we produce them.
It appears that the demand for meat and dairy products will increase, especially as rela-
tively underdeveloped countries become more affluent.
It is in this context that we consider how we should manage the health of farmed
animals, in this case dairy cows. Philosophically we believe that if we want to consume
animal products, it is ethically and morally right to care for them properly and also to
respect and care for the environment in which they are kept. This means maintaining farm
animals in good health; healthy dairy cows will thrive, be cost effective, are good for the
environment and potentially will have ‘a life worth living’ – it should be a win – win
situation.
Thus maintaining a healthy dairy herd is important. While care for the individual ani-
mal should never be overlooked, in this book we focus on disease prevention at the herd
level. In doing this we do not wish to play down the importance of the individual animal,
but we believe that in modern farming systems, preventing disease at the population level
will ultimately be more rewarding. If we get this right, we can improve the lives of many
animals and reduce the need for individual interventions.
Dairy cow herd health is a vast subject, and each chapter in this book could extend to
a large volume in itself. The aim of the book is to cover the most important areas in suffi-
cient detail to allow the inexperienced reader to initiate herd health programmes and to
help the more experienced herd health practitioner to re-evaluate and hopefully improve
their approach. We apologize if some areas receive less attention than others – inevitably
we had to make difficult choices, and we based these choices on our own experiences as
well as on the literature relating to herd health. On that note, we have tried, as far as the
literature allows, to adopt an ‘evidence-based’ approach – we advocate approaches that are
supported by the research literature. This inevitably means that in some areas and for some
approaches uncertainty remains, and we have highlighted many of these areas. While frus-
trating, we would rather the reader is aware of this uncertainty rather than believe that
received clinical wisdom is correct. This is particularly important in herd medicine,
because interventions can be complex and expensive and implementing unproven changes
can be disastrous. |
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