Time-Activity Budget in Horses and Ponies: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on Feeding Dynamics and Management Implications.

The time-activity budget is a key indicator of animal welfare. This meta-analysis integrates data from 14 studies (1979-2020), involving 364 horses across various management conditions (wild, natural-living, and stabled) to evaluate feeding, resting, standing, and locomotion behaviours. Fixed and random effects models, forest plots, and ANOVA were used to assess the influence of management system, sociality, sex, age, body size, and feeding type.

Black soldier fly larvae: a one health approach to investigate gut, and organ health and meat quality response in slow-growing chickens.

Background: The inclusion of sustainable protein sources in poultry feed has become essential for improving animal welfare in livestock production. Black soldier fly larvae are a promising solution due to their high protein content and sustainable production. However, most research has focused on fast-growing poultry breeds, while the effects on native breeds, such as the Bianca di Saluzzo, are less explored.

Dietary processed former foodstuffs for broilers: impacts on growth performance, digestibility, hematobiochemical profiles and liver gene abundance.

Background: The present experiment aimed to evaluate the effects of commercially processed former foodstuffs (cFF) as dietary substitutes of corn, soybean meal and soybean oil on the growth performance, apparent total tract digestibility (ATTD), hematobiochemical profiles, and liver gene abundance in broiler chickens. Two hundred one-day-old male ROSS-308 chicks were assigned to 4 dietary groups (5 replicates of ten birds per replicate) according to their average body weight (BW, 38.0 ± 0.

Microbiota characterization throughout the digestive tract of horses fed a high-fiber vs. a high-starch diet.

Introduction: Diet is one of the main factors influencing the intestinal microbiota in horses, yet a systematic characterization of the microbiota along the length of the digestive tract in clinically healthy horses, homogenous for age and breed and receiving a specific diet is lacking.

Methods: The study used 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing to characterize the microbiota of the intestinal tracts of 19 healthy Bardigiano horses of 14.3  ±  0.

Feeding behaviour related to different feeding devices.

Slow feeding devices (SFDs) are useful tools in order to improve the horse well-being and to reduce wastage, but their use may result in unnatural posture during feeding and frustration behaviours. Moreover, it may be important to evaluate the laterality during feeding. The aim of the study was to investigate ponies' feeding behaviour (i.