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Are Your Animals Depressed?
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UK animal behaviourist, Cindy Engel, describes "depression" in farm animals
in her book "Wild Health" (see www.lovehealth.org/books/animal-healing.htm)
as
follows:

* reduced activity
* loss of reactivity
* head drooping
* eyes narrowed

To this, thanks to the emerging science of "psychoneuroimmunology" (see
www.lovehealth.org/info/psychoneurobiology.htm) we can add:

* increased susceptibility to disease

Depression can result from overwhelming or prolonged stress.
Stress in turn arises from three sources:

a) traumatic experiences (including infectious illness)
b) unsupportive or inhospitable environmental conditions
c) too much change in too short a time period

Vicious cycles can be set up whereby the "stress" state consequences feeds
back on the original stimuli and keep them going or even make them worse.

Disease Epidemics
-----------------------
The recent EU report on last year's foot and mouth epidemic draws attention
to the unprecedented speed and ferocity with which the virus spread in
sheep - a species usually very resistant to FMD virus. Was it just
coincidence that those sheep which succumbed to, spread and replicated the
virus so remarkably easily were part of a massive tide of sheep movements
and market-exposures, the like of which Britain had never seen before?

The infections which are causing lots of trouble (e.g. PRRS, PCV2,
Mycoplasma) in UK pig herds at present are quite difficult to reproduce in
research laboratories without using unnatural routes of infection,
unnaturally large doses of the infectious agent or an overwhelming
combination of infectious agents administered simultaneously.
So, could it be that stress, or even more specifically "depression" is at
least as important as the infectious agents that we usually focus our
disease preventive attention on?

Under pressure from tight or absent profit margins, the pig industry evolved
production systems which increase the number of sharp lifestyle changes that
a pig has to be cope with during it's life. In psychiatry they call these
sharp lifestyle changes "life events" (change of environment, loss of
familiar relationships, traumatic experiences etc) and an undue weight of
life events in a short period of time is a common cause of the health of
people "breaking down" physically and/or mentally.

At the same time as giving pigs, especially young growing pigs, more and
sharper changes
to cope with, we have increasingly evolved husbandry systems (age group
separation) where "social support" from the presence of older pigs is
increasingly absent.

In this connection it is noteworthy that many of the remedies for our
current epidemic of Post-weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome (PMWS) (see
www.pighealth.com/circovirus.htm) are targetting the reduction of stressful
"life events" for young pigs. An accumulation of unduly stressful life
events (weaning, mating, farrowing) might also be a factor in the latest UK
epidemic of infertility in sows.

Clinical depression involves more than just the emotion of feeling "sad". It
involves a restriction, repression or blockage of the
"life force" or "life energy". Sometimes expressed as "broken in spirit",
"loss of vitality" or "losing the will to live".

An editorial in last week's British Medical Journal on "Spirituality and
clinical care" indicates just how fast the medical profession is travelling
towards a more "holistic" approach to human health. Science and technology
have increasingly dominated human health care in the later part of the 20th
century. Have we fallen into the same unbalanced approach with our farm
animals?

To quote The World Health Organization: "Until recently the health
professions have largely followed a medical model, which seeks to treat
patients by focusing on medicines and surgery, and gives less importance to
beliefs and to faith in healing, in the physician and in the doctor-patient
relationship. This reductionist or mechanistic view of patients is no longer
satisfactory. Patients and physicians have begun to realise the value of
elements such as faith, hope, and compassion in the healing process."

If this is indeed true, it raises the question:
Is there a livestock equivalent of "faith, hope, and compassion"?

I suspect there is, and that we might call it "Quality of Life".
Is food, water and shelter enough for a healthy immune system in farm
animals?
If not, what else is needed?
What is your opinion?


Wishing man and beast a better Quality of Life in 2003!
Mike Meredith
www.pighealth.com