Impact of Climate Change on Animal Welfare, Health, and Product Quality of Meat Species.

 

Impact of Climate Change on Animal Welfare, Health, and Product Quality of Meat Species.

Climate change has the potential to be an increasingly formidable challenge to the development of the livestock sector. Global climate change, with predicted temperature increase up to 3°C more by 2050, is likely to create significant threats to animal productivity and welfare due to heat stress. Climate change has complex impacts on domestic animal production system challenging, among others, their thermoregulatory mechanism.

During the marketing process, environmental conditions exceeding the upper critical temperature of the thermal comfort zone result in heat stress affecting the welfare condition of livestock destined to meat production and the quality of their products. Ensuring the respect of the thermal comfort zone during transport, handling and lairage at the abattoir can help curb deaths and occurrence of non-ambulatory animals on arrival at the slaughter plant, handling issues, carcass condemnations due to injuries and meat quality defects. Practices like lower loading densities and control of environmental conditions through the application of cooling systems, or better transport logistics, may help reduce animal and profit losses for the livestock meat chain, but to date the evidence about their efficiency is still unclear.

This Research Topic welcomes manuscripts providing the evidence of the effects of heat stress on losses, animal-based indicators and product quality of meat livestock species or validating the efficiency of preslaughter practices, i.e., during transport, handling and lairage, to ensure the respect of livestock thermal needs under warm environmental conditions.

Keywords: livestock, climate, heat stress, animal welfare, meat quality.