ABSTRACT
During last decades canine health and well being is becoming an important issue for human owners. In dogs, several factors including diet, pathogenic bacterial and stress conditions can affect the composition of the gut microbiota. In this study, we evaluated the effect of dietary chabazitic zeolitite (CZ) supplementation on the contribution of bifidobacteria to the fecal microbiota in training hunting dogs. Fecal microbiota cataloging based on 16S rRNA microbial profiling analyses highlighted an increase of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium in animals treated with CZ, with a simultaneous decrease of pathogens associated with dog gastrointestinal infections, such as Klebsiella and Enterobacter. A detailed profiling of the bifidobacterial population of dogs receiving CZ based on the ITS-based sequencing approach, revealed an enhancement bifidobacterial of species typical of animals such as Bifidobacterium animalis and B. pseudolongum. Moreover, these analyses identified the occurrence of putative new bifidobacterial taxa in both treated and untreated samples.
ABSTRACT
Caffeine has been demonstrated to have a protective effect on neonatal viability of piglets. In order to assess whether caffeine, administered to parturient sows, also affects maternal behaviour, respiratory rate, and dopamine, nitric oxide and serotonin plasma levels, 20 sows, with induced parturition, received orally 27 mg/kg of body weight of caffeine (T group; n=10) or not (NT group; n=10), on day 113 of gestation. Treatment did not affect the farrowing length. There were less stillborn piglets in T group than NT group (0.67 vs 2.44; P<0.05), whereas no differences in dead piglets at 24h from birth was observed. Caffeine did not affect physiological parameters of sows, as the behaviour score of sows laying on belly was reduced (P<0.05). In conclusion, although the present study was carried out with a limited number of sows, administration of caffeine to parturient sows has the potential for reducing the number of stillborn.
