Heat stress

Dr. Robert Collier from the Department of Animal Veterinary and Food Sciences at U of I talks about how the heat we've been experiencing can put stress on animals. Animals all have temperatures called the thermal neutral zone where they don't have to expend any energy to heat or cool themselves. They're comfortable inside that thermal neutral zone. And depending on the size of the animal and the amount of feed intake or how much milk they're producing or how fast they're growing, that thermal neutral zone could shift. So for high producing dairy cows, which we have a lot of in this state, they're very heat sensitive because they're big animals producing a lot of milk and they are eating a lot of feed. And that also causes heat production in their own body. So they're putting out tremendous amounts of heat and are therefore very sensitive to increases in heat around them. So the thermal neutral zone for a dairy cow is much smaller than, say, the thermal neutral zone for a dog or some other animal that's not producing nearly as much heat or is nearly as big or is consuming nearly as much. So dairy cows, very sensitive. And often the first sign of heat stress is they will drop their food intake and drop their milk production. And they're doing this to avoid overheating. What producers can do about it tomorrow.