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 stress cannot be eliminated, it is necessary to protect the animal from its deleterious effects on your livestock.
Stress cannot be treated!
The only way to treat an installed stress would be to resort to veterinary medicinal products. 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!
If one stressed poultry 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 poultry 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 this event is therefore essential to avoid these catastrophic situations. Fortunately, several solutions exist to help you in your farms.
1- Ensuring an optimal environment: However, some essential parameters cannot be controlled, especially during the period of confinement. This strategy is therefore not optimal.
2- Training animals for environmental change: while this would be the perfect strategy, it is far from being economically and practically feasible as it is very time consuming.
3- VeO: Enable animals to adapt easily by reducing the perception of stress, so that events are perceived more positively without changing the natural behaviour of the poultry.
Reducing the individual consequences of stress for better overall results is the path that Phodé proposes with VeO, its “barrier gesture” to stress transmission.
