Animal welfare of Lacaune lambs weaned from artificial feeding.

Introduction: Nowadays, many dairy sheep farms opt for milk replacers after birth. Weaning lambs from milk replacers is expected to be a stressful situation.

Methods: With the aim of researching this practice on the animal behavior, body weight yields, and sanitary status of Lacaune lambs, 60 healthy animals from the same lambing house were employed.

Ejaculation does not contribute to the stress response to electroejaculation in sheep.

Electroejaculation procedures (EEPs) provoke stress; nevertheless, ejaculation produces physiological changes similar as those usually used to measure stress responses. The application of EEP to animals that cannot ejaculate-as ewes-may be useful to discriminate the responses induced by ejaculation from those provoked by EEP. The aim was to determine the stress response to EEP in rams and ewes.

Ischemia-reperfusion lung injury is attenuated in MyD88-deficient mice.

Ischemia-reperfusion lung injury is a common cause of acute morbidity and mortality in lung transplant recipients and has been associated with subsequent development of bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome. Recognition of endogenous ligands released during cellular injury (damage-associated molecular patterns; DAMPs) by Toll-like receptors (TLRs), especially TLR4, has increasingly been recognized as a mechanism for inflammation resulting from tissue damage. TLR4 is implicated in the pathogenesis of ischemia-reperfusion injury of multiple organs including heart, liver, kidney and lung.