Signification de la satiété à court terme chez le mouton : Influence de la qualité du fourrage et des stimuli associés à la prise de nourriture

Abstract

Four wethers were fed twice daily with either poor quality ryegrass hay or good quality lucerne hay, ad lib. Right after the 1st meal immediately after feeding, they were again offered unrestricted quantities of the same or the other hay. A meal was considered to be over once the sheep stopped all ingestive activities for 5 min. A 5 min interruption in intake did not mean that the animal could not resume eating, but this meal criterion was probably not long enough to indicate that the sheep was actually satiated. For either the 1st or the 2nd meal, feed intake was higher (P < 0.01) with lucerne than with ryegrass; this was due to a longer eating time and a higher eating rate. These differences between the 2 hays should depend on hay properties, such as palatability or bulk density. They were amplified during the 2nd meal when the roughage eaten was different from the roughage eaten at the 1st meal. These results suggest that the inclination to eat in an animal that has stopped eating for 5 min depends not only on the quality of the roughage given, but also on the quality of the roughage it has previously been fed.