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Persistent homeothermy in large domestic mammals maintained under standard farming conditions

  • Giuseppe Piccione , Claudia Giannetto , Elisabetta Giudice and Roberto Refinetti EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 14, 2019

Abstract

Background

Mammals, particularly large domestic ones, are considered to be year-round homeotherms. Surprisingly, however, very few long-term studies of the stability of core temperature of large domestic mammals have been conducted.

Methods

We monitored the auricular temperature and rectal temperature of goats, sheep, cows, and donkeys monthly for 2 years and compared their annual variation with their daily and day-to-day variations.

Results

Although ambient temperature varied from 8 °C in the winter to 30 °C in the summer, auricular temperature varied less than 0.5 °C, and rectal temperature varied less than 0.3 °C. We found that the daily oscillation in body temperature was up to three times as large as the day-to-day and month-to-month variations and that month-to-month variation was negligibly larger than day-to-day variation.

Conclusion

Our results confirm persistent homeothermy in large domestic mammals with unrestricted access to food and water and provide a quantitative measure of the relationship between long-term homeothermy and the wider range of daily/circadian oscillation.

  1. Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

  2. Research funding: None declared.

  3. Competing interests: The authors stated no conflict of interest.

  4. Ethical approval: The research involving animal use was conducted in compliance with all the relevant national regulations and institutional policies for the care and use of animals (Italian D.L. 4 March 2014 no. 26 and European Union’s Directive 2010/63/EU). The procedures were approved by the ethical committee for the care and use of animals of the Department of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Messina under protocol no. 12/2015-3.

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Received: 2018-07-07
Accepted: 2019-09-15
Published Online: 2019-11-14

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