Veterinary · Pre-clinical and foundation · also MSVE LPM-222
Camel, yak, mithun, donkey and mule, ducks and quail, and the pastoral and transhumant systems that keep them, plus wildlife management.
In the exams: Indian state PSC Veterinary Officer exams (e.g. RPSC: camel); ICAR AICE-JRF core group 05
This subject covers the animals that do not fit the cattle, buffalo, sheep, goat, pig and chicken courses but carry whole regional economies: the dromedary and Bactrian camel of the hot and cold deserts, the yak of the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau, the mithun of the forested hills of north-east India and Myanmar, the donkey and the mule, and two poultry species kept for special markets, the duck and the Japanese quail. It also covers the ways of keeping livestock that dominate the world's drylands and mountains, pastoral and transhumant systems, and the management side of wildlife: counting, habitat, harvest and conflict with livestock.
These species matter far beyond their numbers. A camel herd is often the only asset that turns desert browse into milk and cash for a household in northern Kenya or western Rajasthan. Yak and yak-cattle hybrids make human life possible above about 3,000 metres. Donkeys and mules carry water, fuel, goods and military supplies where no vehicle can go. Pastoralists manage a large share of the world's land surface, and the veterinarian who serves them must work with mobile herds, scarce services and the interface with wildlife. Each species has peculiarities of reproduction, nutrition and drug response that make it dangerous to treat as 'a big cow' or 'a small horse'.
In India the subject is taught as Livestock Production Management III (MSVE LPM-222) and is examined in state Public Service Commission Veterinary Officer papers, where Rajasthan's camel questions are a known favourite, and in ICAR's postgraduate and JRF/SRF entrance papers under livestock production management. Licensing exams elsewhere (Nepal, Kenya, the Gulf states) test the species that matter locally: yak in Nepal, camels and pastoral systems in East Africa and Arabia. This manual assumes the cattle, small ruminant, pig and chicken basics taught in the other management subjects and concentrates on what is different. Disease pathology, capture drugs and wildlife law are treated in the disease and wildlife medicine subjects and appear here only where they shape management.
Camels belong to the family Camelidae, suborder Tylopoda ('padded feet'), order Artiodactyla. The Old World genus Camelus has three species: the one-humped dromedary (Camelus dromedarius), the two-humped domestic Bactrian (Camelus bactrianus) and the wild Bactrian camel (Camelus ferus) of the Gobi desert in China and Mongolia. The wild Bactrian is listed as Critically Endangered by IUCN and is genetically distinct from the domestic Bactrian rather than its direct ancestor. The South American (New World) camelids are the llama (Lama glama), the alpaca (Vicugna pacos) and their wild relatives, the guanaco and the vicuña. All camelids have 2n = 74 chromosomes, and dromedary-Bactrian hybrids are fertile; first-cross hybrids are bred in Kazakhstan and Turkey for size and vigour.
Dromedaries make up the great majority, roughly nine in ten, of the world's camels. The largest populations are in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel (Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Chad, Niger and neighbours), followed by the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Pakistan and India. Australia holds a large feral dromedary population descended from pack animals imported in the nineteenth century. Bactrians are kept in Mongolia, northern China, Kazakhstan and the cold deserts of Central Asia; in India a small Bactrian population survives in the Nubra valley of Ladakh. India's camel population fell steeply between the livestock censuses of 2012 and 2019 to roughly a quarter of a million head, most of them in Rajasthan, which made the camel its state animal in 2014. ICAR's National Research Centre on Camel is at Bikaner.
New World camelids are kept in the Andes for fibre, meat and packing and are now widespread as fibre and companion animals in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The alpaca has two fleece types, Huacaya (crimped, dense) and Suri (long, lustrous locks). Hand-reared male llamas and alpacas that have imprinted on people can become dangerously aggressive as adults, a condition called aberrant behaviour syndrome or 'berserk male', so crias should be raised with other camelids.
The camel's foot has two toes ending in nails and resting on a broad, elastic pad, which spreads on sand but is easily punctured by thorns and wears on hard roads. Camels walk with a pacing gait, moving both legs of one side together. They rest in sternal recumbency ('couching') on a horny sternal pad and on callosities at the elbows and stifles; mating and much handling are done with the animal couched.
Camelids are not true ruminants, although they ruminate. The stomach has three compartments, usually labelled C1, C2 and C3, with no separate omasum; C1 and C2 carry glandular sacs in their walls, and only the terminal part of C3 has true gastric glands. Digesta are retained longer than in cattle, fibre is digested efficiently, and urea is recycled to the forestomach, so camels thrive on coarse, low-protein browse.
Water economy is the camel's defining trait. A dromedary can lose water amounting to a quarter or more of its body weight, about twice what most domestic species survive, while keeping its plasma volume largely intact. Camelid red cells are oval and non-nucleated, a feature unique among mammals to this family, and withstand large osmotic swelling when a thirsty camel rehydrates; a dehydrated camel can drink more than 100 litres within about ten minutes. When short of water the camel lets its body temperature swing through about 6 degrees C over the day (adaptive heterothermy), storing heat by day and losing it at night by radiation instead of sweating. Its kidneys produce concentrated urine, its faeces are dry, and the nasal passages recover water from expired air. The hump stores fat, not water; its size is a practical index of body condition. These adaptations allow herds to graze far from water and be watered every few days in the cool season, but working and lactating camels in summer need water daily.
India's National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources registers nine camel breeds: Bikaneri, Jaisalmeri, Jalori, Kachchhi, Kharai, Malvi, Marwari, Mewari and Mewati. Bikaneri is a heavy, strong draught and dual-purpose camel; Jaisalmeri is a light, fast riding and racing camel; Kachchhi of Gujarat is valued for milk; and Kharai, also of Kutch, grazes mangroves in the Gulf of Kutch and swims between islands, the only Indian breed adapted to a coastal wetland. Elsewhere, Pakistan's Cholistan desert has the Marecha riding camel and the heavier Brela; Somali and other East African camels are milked intensively by pastoralists; and Gulf states keep dark dairy and light racing types.
Camels supply draught (carts, ploughing, lifting water), riding and military patrols, racing, milk, meat, hair, hide, dung and tourism. In India the draught role has shrunk with mechanisation, and herders report falling demand and prices; Rajasthan's 2015 act restricting the slaughter of camels and their temporary migration or export out of the state is debated for its effect on herders' incomes. In the Gulf, racing drives investment in reproductive technology, and child jockeys have been replaced by robot jockeys.
Camels are seasonal breeders. In the northern hemisphere and India the breeding season falls in the cooler months, broadly November to March; in equatorial Africa breeding follows rainfall and pasture. The female is an induced ovulator: she does not have a spontaneous luteal cycle but shows follicular waves, and ovulation follows mating, triggered by an ovulation-inducing factor in seminal plasma identified as beta-nerve growth factor. Without mating, mature follicles regress or become anovulatory.
The rutting male is dramatic and dangerous. He everts the dulla, an inflatable fold of the soft palate, from the mouth while gurgling; secretes a dark, odorous fluid from the poll glands behind the head; froths at the mouth, grinds his teeth, splashes urine on the tail and back, eats less and becomes aggressive. Handlers keep rutting males apart and restrained. Mating takes place with the female couched and lasts several minutes.
Females reach puberty at about three to four years and calve first at four to six years in most systems. Gestation in the dromedary is about 13 months, commonly quoted as 370 to 390 days, and slightly longer in the Bactrian. A single calf is the rule. Because of the long gestation, late puberty and a long lactation, traditional herds calve only every two years or so, which limits herd growth. A pregnant female typically raises and curls her tail and refuses the male ('tail cocking'), a field sign used by herders; rectal palpation and ultrasonography confirm pregnancy. Artificial insemination is hampered by the viscous, gel-like seminal plasma, while embryo transfer is used commercially in racing and dairy camels in the Gulf, where the first cloned camel was born in 2009.
Camels are browsers that take small bites from many species and walk while feeding, which spreads grazing pressure. In the Thar desert key browse includes khejri (Prosopis cineraria), ber (Ziziphus spp.), Acacia and Capparis, with halophytes such as Haloxylon and Salsola where available. Camels need much more salt than cattle and do poorly without halophytes or salt supplement. Stall feeding uses legume straws (guar, moth and gram), groundnut haulms and green fodder, with concentrate for working, pregnant and lactating animals. Camels fed only cereal straw and grain in confinement are prone to obesity, foot problems and digestive upsets.
Control is by a nose peg (nakel) through the nostril wing or septum, with a light rope, and by couching and hobbling. Pack and riding saddles must be padded and fitted to prevent saddle sores over the hump and withers. Work is scheduled in the cool hours. Housing is simple: a fenced or thorn enclosure with shade and a dry, sandy floor; camels tolerate dry heat but not mud and prolonged wet.
Camel milk yield ranges from a few litres a day in extensive desert herds to well over ten litres in selected dairy camels with good feeding, over a lactation of 12 to 18 months; milk let-down in traditional herds depends on the calf's presence. Compared with cow milk, camel milk has more vitamin C (roughly three times), smaller fat globules and no beta-lactoglobulin, the cow-milk protein most often blamed for allergy. It does not coagulate well with calf rennet, so cheese-making needs camel chymosin. Fermented products include shubat in Central Asia and suusac in Somalia and Kenya, and commercial camel dairies operate in the Gulf, East Africa and India, where camel milk now has a national food standard. Camel meat is lean; hair, especially from the Bactrian, is spun and woven; hides and bone supply crafts such as the gold-leaf 'usta' work of Bikaner.
Economic appraisal of a camel unit starts from the long reproductive cycle: with calving every two years, a she-camel produces few calves in her life, so female mortality and age at first calving dominate herd growth.
Trypanosomiasis due to Trypanosoma evansi (surra) is the most important camel disease in Asia and Africa. It is transmitted mechanically by biting flies, mainly Tabanus and Stomoxys, causes fever, anaemia, oedema, abortion and wasting, and flares after the rains when flies peak. Camels have a narrow safety margin for some trypanocides, notably diminazene, so drug choice must follow camel-specific data. Any treatment must be confirmed against the product label and your national formulary. Sarcoptic mange is the most important skin disease, intensely itchy and transmissible to people. Camelpox causes pock lesions in young camels and occasionally mild lesions in handlers. Dromedaries are the reservoir of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which causes mild disease in camels but severe disease in people. Other management-relevant problems are brucellosis acquired from cattle and small ruminants, the camel nasal bot (Cephalopina titillator), ticks of the genus Hyalomma, hydatidosis, calf diarrhoea and foreign-body impaction from plastic around settlements. Drug doses extrapolated from cattle can harm camels; use camelid data.
The domestic yak (Bos grunniens, sometimes placed in Poephagus) was domesticated from the wild yak (Bos mutus), which survives on the Tibetan Plateau and is listed as Vulnerable. Yaks have 2n = 60 chromosomes, like cattle, and interbreed with them. They live mainly between about 3,000 and 5,500 metres on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalaya, Pamirs, Altai and Mongolia; China holds the great majority of the world's yaks, with Mongolia second. In India yaks are kept in Ladakh, Lahaul-Spiti and Kinnaur in Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and western Arunachal Pradesh, and the Indian yak population is small and falling. ICAR's National Research Centre on Yak is at Dirang, Arunachal Pradesh. The Arunachali yak was the first yak breed registered in India; Chinese breeds include Jiulong, Maiwa, the Tianzhu White and the Datong yak, a polled breed developed by crossing with wild yak.
The yak is built for cold and hypoxia. It has a large chest, lungs and heart; a thick coat of long outer guard hair forming a 'skirt' over the belly and flanks, with a fine down undercoat that is moulted each spring; few functional sweat glands; and a thick layer of subcutaneous fat in autumn. Yaks do not develop the hypoxic pulmonary hypertension that causes brisket disease in cattle moved to high altitude. The price of this adaptation is poor heat tolerance: yaks become stressed at temperatures that cattle find mild, and they fare badly below about 2,500 to 3,000 metres or in humid valleys, which limits where they can be moved.
Yak husbandry is almost always transhumant. Herds graze high alpine pastures in summer and move down to winter pastures near the settlement, sometimes with hay or crop residues. Forage is abundant for only three to five months; animals gain weight and lay down fat in summer and autumn and lose a large part of it over winter and early spring, when calves and weak adults die if snow covers the pasture. Herders describe the cycle as fat in summer, strong in autumn, thin in winter and dying in spring. Supplementary winter feeding, hay making, fenced winter pastures and warm shelters for calves are the main interventions promoted by research stations.
Reproduction is seasonal and slow. Females mate in summer, roughly July to September, when nutrition is best, and calve the following spring after a gestation of about 258 days, shorter than in cattle. Heifers usually calve first at four or five years of age under range conditions, and many females calve two years out of three or every other year because a cow that is still lactating in a poor winter does not conceive the next summer. Herders exchange bulls between villages to limit inbreeding in small isolated herds.
Crossing yak with cattle gives hybrids known in Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet as dzo (male) and dzomo (female), with many local names. The F1 hybrid shows heterosis for milk yield, body size and tolerance of lower altitudes; female hybrids are fertile, but F1 males are sterile, in line with Haldane's rule that the heterogametic sex of a hybrid is the one affected. Backcrossing female hybrids to yak or cattle bulls continues the system, but fertility and vigour fall in later generations.
A yak cow gives a few hundred kilograms of milk in a lactation, far less than a dairy cow, but the milk is rich, with fat commonly 5.5 to 7.5 percent. It is made into butter, ghee and butter tea, and into soft and hard cheeses such as chhurpi, a hard dried cheese of the eastern Himalaya. Yaks also give meat, hair for ropes, tents and blankets, down fibre for textiles, hides, dung for fuel in a treeless landscape, and pack and riding transport.
Health problems that recur in yak herds are winter starvation and cold exposure, calf diarrhoea and pneumonia, foot-and-mouth disease, haemorrhagic septicaemia, brucellosis, liver fluke, gastrointestinal nematodes and warble fly (Hypoderma) infestation. Delivering services is hard because herds are scattered on remote pastures for much of the year.
The mithun (Bos frontalis), also called gayal, is a semi-domesticated bovine descended from the wild gaur (Bos gaurus). It has 2n = 58 chromosomes, two fewer than cattle, because of a chromosomal fusion. Mithun are kept in the hill forests of north-east India, chiefly Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram, and in Myanmar, Bhutan, Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts and Yunnan in China. The mithun is the state animal of both Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland. ICAR's National Research Centre on Mithun is at Jharnapani, Medziphema, Nagaland. Four strains are described in India, named after their states: Arunachali, Nagami, Manipuri and Mizo.
Among many tribal communities the mithun measures wealth and status. It is given as bride price, exchanged to settle disputes and sacrificed at feasts and festivals, so it is often kept less for regular production than as a store of social value. Mithun meat is highly prized and fetches a better price than beef in local markets.
The traditional system is free range in the forest. Animals roam unattended in jungle, eating tree leaves, shrubs, bamboo and grasses, and their owners find them and keep them loyal to the village by offering common salt, which mithun crave; the salt lick is the main management tool. Animals are identified by ear notches or other owner marks. Breeding is uncontrolled and calving takes place in the forest, so calf mortality and inbreeding can be high and records do not exist.
NRC Mithun and state agencies promote a semi-intensive system: forest grazing by day, return to a fenced enclosure at night with salt and mineral mixture, controlled breeding, vaccination and deworming, and stall feeding of tree fodder and concentrate during scarcity. Mithun cows are not traditionally milked, but the milk is very rich in fat and protein and research herds have shown it can be made into high-value products. Gestation is a little longer than in cattle, roughly 290 days. Mithun crossed with local cattle produce hybrids (in Bhutan the jatsha male and jatsham female) used for milk and draught; as with yak hybrids the F1 males are sterile.
Health constraints are foot-and-mouth disease, haemorrhagic septicaemia, internal and external parasites, mineral deficiencies, and losses to predators and accidents in steep forest. Shrinking forest, shifting cultivation and roads are reducing free-range habitat, which makes semi-intensive management increasingly necessary.
The domestic donkey (Equus asinus) descends from the African wild ass. Donkeys have 2n = 62 chromosomes and horses 2n = 64. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey (jack) and a female horse (mare); a hinny is the offspring of a stallion and a female donkey (jenny or jennet). Both have 63 chromosomes and are almost always infertile; fertile mule mares are reported but are extremely rare, and male mules are sterile. Mules combine the donkey's hardiness, sure-footedness and patience with the horse's size and strength, which is why armies, including India's Remount and Veterinary Corps, have relied on them in mountain terrain. Mule pregnancies in mares carry an increased risk of neonatal isoerythrolysis, because the foal inherits a donkey red-cell antigen against which the mare can make antibodies.
The world has tens of millions of donkeys, with the largest numbers in Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa, and in Asia and Latin America. India's donkey population fell sharply between the 2012 and 2019 censuses. The Halari donkey of Gujarat and the Spiti donkey of Himachal Pradesh are registered Indian breeds. A global trade in donkey hides, used to make the gelatin product ejiao for traditional Chinese medicine, has drained donkey numbers in parts of Africa and Asia, and the African Union has agreed a continent-wide moratorium on slaughter for skins.
Donkeys evolved in arid, rocky country. They tolerate dehydration better than horses, recover by drinking quickly, and digest fibrous forage efficiently. They need less energy than a pony of the same weight and eat roughly 1.3 to 1.8 percent of body weight as dry matter a day, so a diet based on barley or wheat straw with limited hay or grazing suits most adult donkeys. Rich grass, cereals and sweet feeds cause obesity and laminitis. Body condition is scored on a five-point scale, and fat is deposited in the neck crest, over the rump and along the flanks; crest fat may persist after weight loss.
The single most important donkey peculiarity is hyperlipaemia: when an obese or stressed donkey stops eating (pain, transport, a change of companion, late pregnancy or lactation), fat is mobilised faster than the liver can handle, the blood becomes lipaemic and fatty liver and multiple organ failure follow. Any donkey that has stopped eating is an emergency, and preventing obesity and abrupt feed changes is the main control.
Donkeys are stoic and hide pain; dullness may be the only sign of colic or laminitis. Their coat is not waterproof, so they need shelter from rain and wind. Hooves are more upright and grow long if not trimmed regularly. Dental disease is common in older animals. Several drugs are handled differently by donkeys than by horses, some being cleared faster and others more slowly, so horse doses are not automatically safe. Any treatment must be confirmed against the product label and your national formulary.
Working donkeys and mules carry packs, pull carts and ploughs, and carry water, bricks and fuel. Common welfare problems are wounds from poorly fitted harness and saddles, overloading, lameness from neglected feet, untreated dental disease, dehydration on long working days, and beating. Practical standards include a well-padded, correctly fitted harness, loads matched to the animal's size and condition, rest and water during work, and hoof trimming every couple of months. Live weight is estimated in the field from heart girth and height with a nomogram or formula developed for working donkeys, because weigh scales are rarely available and drug doses depend on weight.
Jennies are seasonally polyoestrous, with gestation of about 12 months (often a little over a year) and a single foal. Donkey milk is low in fat and casein and high in lactose, closer in composition to human milk than cow milk is, and is sold at a premium for infants with cow-milk protein allergy (under medical supervision) and for cosmetics. Yields are small, under about two litres a day, and the foal must be kept close to stimulate let-down. In India the NRC on Equines, Hisar, keeps Halari donkeys for milk research at its Bikaner campus.
Domestic ducks, apart from the Muscovy, descend from the mallard (Anas platyrhynchos). The Muscovy (Cairina moschata) is a separate species from the Americas; it is quiet (it hisses instead of quacking), and a Muscovy drake crossed with a common duck gives the sterile mule duck, used for meat and, in France, for foie gras. Egg breeds include the Khaki Campbell, developed in England and capable of about 300 eggs a year, and the Indian Runner, which stands upright and runs instead of waddling. Meat breeds include the White Pekin, the basis of commercial duck meat worldwide, the Aylesbury and the Rouen. Indian native ducks include the Kuttanad ducks of Kerala (Chara and Chemballi), the Pati duck of Assam and the Sylhet Mete and Nageswari of the north-east and Bengal; they lay fewer eggs than Khaki Campbell but forage well and resist local disease.
Asia keeps most of the world's ducks, with China far ahead. Systems range from herded flocks that forage on harvested paddy fields and canals, through rice-duck integration in which ducks weed and fertilise rice fields and eat pests, and duck-fish integration with housing over ponds, to intensive confinement of Pekin broilers and breeders. In Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, flocks of a few hundred to a few thousand layers are walked from field to field after each harvest, a form of nomadic poultry keeping.
Ducks are hardier than chickens, need simpler housing and tolerate wet ground, and their productive laying life extends over two or more seasons. They lay mostly in the early morning, so layers are kept in their night shelter until mid-morning to avoid lost and dirty eggs. Ducks need drinking water deep enough to immerse the head and clean the eyes and nostrils, but swimming water is not essential for production, and wet litter is the main housing problem. Duck eggs weigh about 65 to 75 g against about 55 to 60 g for a commercial chicken egg, and their shells are more often soiled; they should be dry-cleaned and handled with Salmonella control in mind.
Incubation takes 28 days for common ducks and about 35 days for the Muscovy. Ducklings are brooded at about 30 to 32 degrees C in the first week, lowered by about 3 degrees each week, and need brooding for a shorter time than chicks. A drake is recognised by its curled tail ('sex') feathers and quieter, hoarse voice; ducks quack loudly. Commercial White Pekin broilers reach about 3 kg live weight in six to seven weeks.
Ducks are among the most sensitive species to aflatoxin, and ducklings fed mouldy groundnut cake or maize suffer liver damage and death, so feed quality control matters more than in chickens. Diseases specific to ducks include duck plague (duck viral enteritis), duck viral hepatitis in young ducklings, Riemerella anatipestifer infection ('new duck disease'), and botulism in stagnant water. Ducks are also important silent carriers of avian influenza viruses, which links duck management to national disease control.
Duck eggs are eaten fresh and processed into salted eggs and the alkali-preserved 'century egg' in China and South-East Asia, and in the Philippines and Vietnam the fertile egg incubated for about two to three weeks is eaten as balut. Duck meat is consumed roast, smoked and in curries; down and feathers are by-products. Economics depend on low-cost foraging: herded and integrated ducks use spilled grain, snails and weeds, so their feed cost per egg is low, while confined layers must be fed a full ration and need the higher laying rate of Khaki Campbell or commercial hybrids to pay. The main economic records for a duck unit are the same as for chicken layers and broilers: hen-day and hen-housed egg production, egg mass, feed per dozen eggs, mortality, and live weight and feed conversion for meat ducks. Herded flocks add costs that confined flocks do not have, such as payments to landowners for gleaning rights and the herders' labour, and they carry risks of their own: theft, predators, pesticide residues in paddy fields and the spread of duck plague and avian influenza as flocks move between districts. Many state governments therefore require vaccination and registration of migratory duck flocks.
The Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica, often written Coturnix coturnix japonica) is the main farmed quail for eggs and meat; the bobwhite quail of North America is reared mainly for game. Japanese quail have several features that suit small-scale farming. They mature very early, with hens laying from about six to seven weeks of age. They lay roughly 250 to 300 eggs in the first year. The egg weighs about 10 g, close to 8 percent of the hen's body weight, has a mottled brown-and-cream shell and hatches in about 17 to 18 days. Three to four generations a year are possible, so quail are also a standard laboratory model for genetics and physiology. A bird needs very little space and feed, and the species is hardy, although not immune to disease. Unlike in chickens, adult females are heavier than males.
In India, ICAR's Central Avian Research Institute, Izatnagar, has developed several strains of Japanese quail, including broiler and plumage-colour lines. Commercial broiler quail are marketed at about four to five weeks of age, when the meat-to-bone ratio and feed efficiency are favourable.
Quail chicks are tiny and lose heat quickly, so they are brooded warmer than chicks of larger species, at about 35 to 37 degrees C under the brooder in the first week, reduced each week. Shallow drinkers, or marbles or pebbles in the drinker trough, prevent drowning, and paper over the litter or floor for the first days helps chicks find feed. Layers and breeders are usually kept in multi-tier cages, which save space and keep eggs clean; floor-space allowances vary between guidelines and countries and should be taken from the national code in use. Layers receive 14 to 16 hours of light a day.
Quail need more protein in the diet than chickens of the same age, with starter diets around 24 to 27 percent crude protein and layer diets about 20 to 22 percent, plus high calcium for laying. Feed intake of an adult laying quail is about 25 to 30 g a day. Breeding flocks are mated at about one male to two or three females.
Males are distinguished from three weeks of age in wild-type plumage: the male has a rusty-brown breast without spots, while the female's breast is pale with dark speckles. Mature males also have a large cloacal (proctodeal) gland that produces a white, foamy secretion, which is a reliable sign of sexual activity.
Quail are susceptible to cannibalism and feather pecking in crowded or bright cages, to coccidiosis, and to ulcerative enteritis, a Clostridium colinum infection so characteristic of quail that it is called 'quail disease', which causes intestinal ulcers and liver necrosis. Bobwhite quail are also affected by quail bronchitis, an adenovirus infection of the young. Quail eggs are sold fresh and pickled and are popular in East and South-East Asia; quail meat is a premium product. Because quail are small, economics hinge on feed cost per dozen eggs or per kilogram of live weight, on hatchability, and on marketing in small units close to consumers. Good practice for a quail unit is to keep light intensity low and even in laying cages to reduce pecking, to trim beaks only where national welfare rules permit it, to use clean, coccidiosis-controlled litter for brooding, and to collect eggs at least once a day because the thin-shelled eggs crack easily. Breeding flocks are replaced often, because fertility and hatchability fall after several months of lay. Quail farming in some countries needs a licence, because wild Coturnix species are protected; farmers should check whether the domestic Japanese quail is exempt in their jurisdiction.
Pastoralism is livestock production that relies mainly on grazing natural rangeland, usually with some mobility of herds. Three forms are distinguished. In nomadic pastoralism the whole household moves with the herds and there is no fixed home. In transhumant pastoralism herds move seasonally, often along regular routes, between pastures while the household or part of it keeps a permanent base. In agro-pastoralism households grow crops and keep livestock, usually from a settled village, and herds move over shorter distances. The categories blur; families shift between them as rainfall, markets and policy change.
Rangelands cover a large share of the earth's land surface, commonly put at around half, and pastoral systems dominate drylands and high mountains where cropping is impossible or risky. Estimates of the number of pastoralists vary widely, from about 200 million upward, depending on the definition used. Well-known pastoral peoples include the Fulani of West Africa, the Maasai, Turkana, Borana and Somali of East Africa, the Tuareg of the Sahara, Bedouin of Arabia, Mongolian herders and the Sami reindeer herders of northern Europe. In India they include the Raika (Rebari) camel and sheep breeders of Rajasthan, the Maldhari of Kutch who keep Banni buffalo and Kankrej cattle, the Changpa of Ladakh who keep pashmina goats and yak, the Gaddi, Bakarwal and Gujjar of the western Himalaya, the Dhangar of Maharashtra and the Kuruba of the Deccan.
Drylands have low and highly variable rainfall, so forage changes from year to year and from place to place. Pastoral strategies are designed to track this variability rather than to fix a carrying capacity. Mobility moves animals to where rain has fallen. Keeping several species spreads risk: camels and goats browse and survive drought, cattle and sheep graze and recover quickly after rain. Herds are split between a milking herd near the camp and dry stock taken to distant pastures. Animals are lent, given and exchanged among kin and stock friends, which restocks families after losses. Local breeds are chosen for hardiness, walking ability and water tolerance rather than peak yield.
Range ecology has been reinterpreted since the 1980s. The older 'equilibrium' view treated over-grazing as the main cause of degradation and recommended destocking to a fixed carrying capacity. The 'non-equilibrium' view, developed from work in arid East Africa, holds that in very variable environments rainfall drives vegetation more than grazing does, and that opportunistic stocking with mobility is often the sustainable strategy. Garrett Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons' argued that shared pastures will be over-grazed; Elinor Ostrom and others showed that communities often manage commons well under customary rules, and that degradation follows when those rules break down. Both views have field support; which applies depends on the site.
To compare herds of different species, planners use livestock units. The tropical livestock unit (TLU) is an animal of 250 kg live weight; commonly used coefficients for sub-Saharan Africa are camel 1.0, cattle 0.7, sheep and goats 0.1 each, donkey 0.5 and horse 0.8, and these vary between sources and regions. Carrying capacity is the number of animal units an area can support for a stated period without long-term damage. It is estimated from available forage dry matter, a proper-use factor (the share of forage that can be grazed while leaving enough for regrowth and soil cover, often 30 to 50 percent), and daily intake per unit, commonly taken as 2.5 to 3 percent of body weight. These estimates are useful for planning but must be read against rainfall variability. A carrying capacity worked out for an average year will be exceeded in a drought year and wasted in a wet one, which is why pastoralists move or sell animals instead of holding a fixed number. Planners therefore combine the arithmetic with rainfall records, monitoring of key forage plants, and the herders' own judgement of pasture condition. Water points are a second limit: cattle and sheep rarely graze more than a day's walk from water, so forage far from water is effectively unavailable to them, while camels can use it.
Pastoral areas are usually the least served by government veterinary services, yet they hold many of the animals and diseases of national importance. Approaches that work include community-based animal health workers (CAHWs), trained from within the community and linked to a supervising veterinarian; mobile clinics and vaccination at water points, markets and along routes; participatory epidemiology, which draws on herders' own knowledge of disease; and timing interventions to the herding calendar. CAHWs and pastoral surveillance played a large part in the final stages of rinderpest eradication, declared in 2011, and are central to the global programme to eradicate peste des petits ruminants by 2030.
Threats to pastoral systems include loss of grazing land to farming, fencing, conservation areas and infrastructure; blocked migration routes; sedentarisation programmes; conflict over water and pasture; drought made more frequent by climate change; and weak access to markets. Responses include securing communal land rights and corridors, drought early-warning systems, strategic destocking and restocking, fodder banks, and index-based livestock insurance, pioneered in northern Kenya, which pays out when satellite measures of vegetation show forage failure, without assessing individual animals.
Transhumance is the regular, seasonal movement of livestock between pastures, with herders returning to a permanent base. Vertical (altitudinal) transhumance moves animals up mountains to alpine meadows in summer and down to valleys or foothills in winter; it is practised in the Himalaya, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Andes and the Atlas. Horizontal transhumance moves animals across plains, usually following the rains, as in the Sahel, where herds move north in the rainy season and south to river valleys and farmland in the dry season, and in Rajasthan, where sheep and camel flocks leave the desert in the dry months for Haryana, Punjab, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
Mediterranean and Alpine transhumance was inscribed by UNESCO on its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2019, and Spain's historic network of drove roads, the cañadas reales, is still legally protected. In West Africa the ECOWAS states adopted a protocol on transhumance in 1998 that created the International Transhumance Certificate, under which herds crossing borders must carry vaccination and health documentation.
The Gaddi shepherds of Himachal Pradesh winter their sheep and goats in the Shivalik foothills and lower Kangra, and climb in summer through the Dhauladhar passes to alpine pastures in Lahaul, Pangi and Chamba, returning in autumn. The Bakarwal of Jammu and Kashmir move goats and sheep from the Jammu plains in winter to the meadows of Kashmir and Ladakh in summer. Gujjar communities, including the Van Gujjar of Uttarakhand, move buffalo herds from Shivalik forests in winter to high meadows (bugyals) in summer, selling milk on the way. Yak herders of Ladakh, Sikkim and Arunachal, such as the Brokpa of the Monpa region, move between summer and winter yak pastures, and the Changpa of the Changthang plateau move goats, sheep and yak between grazing camps.
These systems depend on access to forest and alpine grazing under customary or permit-based rights, and on cooperation with farmers along the route. Movement dates are set by snowmelt on the passes in spring and by the first autumn snow, and flocks of several hundred animals are moved by a few herders with guarding dogs, such as the Gaddi dog. Women and older family members often stay at the base village and care for crops and a few milking animals, so the household itself is split between two places for much of the year. Grazing permits and the number of animals allowed on forest and alpine pastures are regulated by state forest departments, and changes in these rules can make a migration route unworkable.
Transhumance uses forage that would otherwise be wasted, such as alpine meadows, fallow land and crop stubble; avoids the heat of the plains and the snow of the mountains; and returns nutrients to farmland. In 'penning' or folding arrangements, farmers pay herders in cash or grain to keep flocks overnight on their fields, so that dung and urine fertilise the land.
The constraints are long walks with weak animals, lambing and kidding on the move, predators such as snow leopard, wolf and leopard, exposure to cold, poisonous plants on unfamiliar pastures, loss of routes to roads and farms, and conflict with forest and wildlife authorities. Moving herds also move disease: peste des petits ruminants, sheep and goat pox, foot-and-mouth disease, contagious caprine pleuropneumonia and enterotoxaemia spread along routes, and herds pick up liver fluke, ticks and tsetse-borne trypanosomosis on particular pastures. Veterinary services adapt by vaccinating and deworming at assembly points before the move, setting up health camps at passes and staging points, issuing movement health certificates, and using herders' calendars to time interventions. Records of route, dates and losses are the basis of any health plan for a migratory flock.
Wildlife management applies ecology to keep wild populations at desired levels: conserving rare species, harvesting abundant ones sustainably, controlling pests and reducing conflict with people and livestock. Its basic data are population size, density and trend. A total count tries to see every animal, which is feasible only for conspicuous species in open country. Sample counts survey part of the area and scale up. In a strip transect, all animals within a fixed distance either side of a line are counted, and density is the count divided by the strip area (twice the half-width times the length); line-transect distance sampling instead records the perpendicular distance to each animal and models how detection falls with distance. Indirect methods count signs: pellet-group counts divide the number of dung groups per unit area by the defecation rate and the number of days over which they accumulated.
Capture-mark-recapture estimates a closed population from the proportion of marked animals in a second sample. In the Lincoln-Petersen estimator, N = M x C / R, where M is the number marked in the first sample, C the number caught in the second, and R the number of marked animals recaptured; Chapman's modification, N = (M + 1)(C + 1)/(R + 1) - 1, reduces bias when samples are small. Camera traps make individuals with unique coat patterns, such as tigers and leopards, 'marked' without capture, and spatially explicit capture-recapture models now underlie India's national tiger estimation.
A population growing without limits increases exponentially, N(t) = N0 x e^(rt), where r is the intrinsic rate of increase. In reality growth slows as density approaches the carrying capacity K; the logistic model, dN/dt = rN(1 - N/K), gives the fastest growth, and hence the maximum sustainable yield (MSY = rK/4), when the population is at half of K. Harvest strategies for game ranching, deer culling and sustainable use rest on this logic, with large safety margins because r and K are estimated with error and vary with weather. Deer farming for venison and velvet antler in New Zealand, game ranching in southern Africa and crocodile ranching are examples of wildlife production systems. Ranching usually means collecting eggs or young from the wild and rearing them, whereas farming means a closed breeding cycle in captivity; the distinction matters under the trade rules of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Culling of overabundant herbivores, as with deer in parts of Europe, North America and New Zealand, is a management tool to protect forests and crops. Any harvest plan needs regular population monitoring so that quotas can be cut quickly if numbers fall, and it should consider age and sex structure: removing mainly adult males has less effect on growth than removing breeding females.
Habitat management includes water provision, controlled burning and cutting to keep grasslands open, removal of invasive plants such as Lantana and Prosopis juliflora, and protecting corridors that connect populations. Protected areas are zoned: a core of strict protection, a buffer where regulated use is allowed and, in biosphere reserves under UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere programme, an outer transition zone with settlements. IUCN classifies species risk on its Red List (Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Near Threatened, Least Concern, plus Data Deficient). Several wild relatives of the species in this subject are listed: the wild Bactrian camel is Critically Endangered, and the wild yak and the gaur are Vulnerable. The Indian wild ass (Equus hemionus khur) survives in the Little Rann of Kutch.
Pastoral and transhumant herds share land with wildlife, which brings competition for grazing and water, predation of livestock by snow leopard, wolf, leopard, tiger and lion, retaliatory killing of predators, and disease spillover in both directions. Management responses are predator-proof night corrals, guarding dogs and herders, prompt compensation for verified losses, livestock insurance, community conservation programmes and rotational grazing plans that leave space for wild herbivores.
Veterinary drugs can harm wildlife directly. Diclofenac residues in cattle carcasses caused the collapse of Gyps vulture populations in South Asia; India banned diclofenac for veterinary use in 2006 and later extended the ban to other vulture-toxic NSAIDs such as ketoprofen and aceclofenac, while meloxicam has been shown to be safe for vultures. Captive-breeding centres are restoring vulture numbers. A veterinarian's choice of drug for a cow that may die in the open is therefore a wildlife management decision.
Learn the facts that separate these species from cattle and chickens, because examiners test exactly those: camelid stomach and red cells, induced ovulation, yak and mithun chromosome numbers, hybrid sterility, donkey hyperlipaemia, duck and quail incubation periods and the quail sexing method. Memorise the NRC locations and registered breeds for Indian papers. Practise the calculations by hand: livestock units, carrying capacity, gestation dates, hen-day production and capture-recapture estimates. If your college has a camel, equine or duck unit, spend time handling animals there, and read about one pastoral group in your region so that you can reason about systems questions rather than recite definitions.
In a camel, yak or pastoral district your work is herd health on the move. Plan vaccination and deworming with herders around their calendar: before the summer move, at assembly points and at water. Diagnose surra and mange early in camels and check drug choice against camelid data. Treat every anorexic donkey as a possible hyperlipaemia case and weigh it with a heart-girth formula before dosing. Advise duck farmers on aflatoxin and duck plague vaccination, and quail farmers on brooding temperature and cannibalism. Train and supervise community animal health workers, keep records of losses by route and season, and report notifiable disease in mobile herds promptly because it will travel.
At district or state level you design services for animals that do not stay in one place. Decide where mobile clinics and staging-point health camps go, negotiate grazing corridors and permits with forest departments, and argue for pastoral needs in land-use and drought plans. Use livestock census trends, such as the fall in Indian camel and donkey numbers, to plan conservation of breeds and to judge whether laws and markets are helping or harming herders. Commission breed registration and community breed-saving schemes, link camel and donkey milk producers to markets and food standards, and manage livestock-wildlife conflict with compensation and insurance schemes that pay quickly and fairly.
Research questions in this field are wide open. Examples are the genetics of hypoxia and cold tolerance in yak and of water economy in the camel, the reproductive physiology of induced ovulators, hybrid sterility in yak and mithun crosses, the ecology of non-equilibrium rangelands under climate change, the epidemiology of disease along transhumance routes, and robust methods for estimating wildlife and livestock populations from camera traps and satellites. Good work combines field data from mobile herds, which are hard to sample, with genomics and modelling, and is done in partnership with pastoral communities whose knowledge and consent shape the questions and the results.
Exact current population figures are given only as trends because census and FAO numbers change and differ between sources; check the latest livestock census and FAOSTAT. The manual gives no drug doses, vaccination schedules or withdrawal periods for any species: these depend on national registration and product labels, and camelid and donkey data are scarce. Space allowances for duck and quail housing are not given because codes differ by country. New World camelid husbandry, reindeer, deer farming, turkeys, geese and guinea fowl are touched on only briefly or not at all. Ages at first calving, milk yields and calving intervals are textbook ranges for traditional systems and will be better under good management. Wildlife legislation, capture drugs and wildlife diseases are covered in the wildlife and zoo medicine subject; country-specific rules for transhumant movement beyond the examples given are not covered.
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