Behavior and wear of the hooves of confined sheep in different types of floors

Abstract

The objective of this work was to evaluate the thermal environment, the surface temperature of the floor, wear of the hooves, ingestive behavior, and the productive performance of Santa Inês sheep, confined in facilities with individual pen, with three types of floor (masonry, rubber, and sand). The research was developed in the dry period in the Brazilian Semiarid region, using 18 females with 120 days of age and weighing 21.33 ± 2.62 kg. It was used a completely randomized design with three treatments and six replications. A 3 × 4 factorial was used for the surface temperature, with three types of floor and four collection times, applying the Tukey test at 5% probability and regression analysis by the SAS software. For the morphometric measures, ingestive behavior, and performance of the animals, the Tukey test at 5% was applied through the PROC GLM, and the continuous behavioral measures had their frequencies compared by the Chi-square test at the level of 5% through the PROC FREQ. The sand floor had the highest surface temperature concerning the other floors, regardless of the time. The animals kept on the masonry floor had a reduction of 6.17 and 5.56 cm in the upper length of the front hull and a reduction of 3.37 and 3.36 cm in the rear hull, respectively. The ingestive behavior and performance of the animals (90 g animal^-1 day^-1) were not affected by the type of floor used.