Typically, our scientific meetings are attended by animal production specialists, nutritionists, veterinarians, and maybe geneticists. Yet, there are many other disciplines where current knowledge could contribute to the scientific study of village poultry. Take, for example, population biology. The village chicken is nearly, but not quite, a feral animal. The only things that distinguish it are small feed supplements, offtake for sale and consumption, and sometimes night housing, assuming there are no medical interventions. In many of our surveys we need to know the numbers of eggs, chicks, growers and adults, and are interested in the variation of this population with time. So why not tap the expertise of theoretical population biology? Predators have been shown to be a significant cause of loss of family poultry in a number of countries.
A lot of theoretical work has been done on cycles in predator-prey populations, which could be applied to the study of this constraint in family poultry. What is the other prey for the predators that prey on poultry? What other factors affect the population of the predators? There is more to find out than just the numbers of birds that have been removed from poultry flocks, and maybe there is more that we can do than just providing housing, or painting the chickens a different colour (as was suggested in our recent electronic conference). The same goes for ecology. We often talk of the "scavenging feed resource base", but how many of us discuss our models with professional ecologists, to put questions such as: íwhat is the interspecific competition for the scavenging feed resource base?Î or íis the diversity of species relevant?Î
Those of us who are concerned with infectious diseases of family poultry inevitably practice epidemiology, and we know the basic principles of the science. If we look across to human epidemiology we find that advanced mathematical models have been developed to explain cycles of infectious diseases. Indeed, it seems that human epidemiology in general is somewhat more advanced than veterinary epidemiology, which is surprising considering the greater facility with which veterinary experimental work can be conducted. Perhaps the models developed for human epidemiology would help us elucidate the cycles of infectious diseases in family poultry. They could also be used to predict the effect of interventions such as vaccination.
Techniques in molecular biology are already widely applied to infectious diseases of animals, but not so much yet in the case of family poultry. I donÎt mean to say that you need to set up a molecular biology laboratory in an African village; this just isnÎt possible without an industrial infrastructure. The same results, however, can be obtained through collaboration. There are people in existing laboratories with theoretical interests just waiting for your virus isolates to do oligonucleotide fingerprints on them. The results from this sort of study could be of great help in understanding the epidemiology of the diseases that infect family poultry. Similar prospects exist with molecular genetics. While the ícity chickenÎ has already been bred almost beyond its biological limits Ë one only has to think of the buckling legs of the modern broiler breeders Ë his country ícousinÎ still has a diverse genetic patrimony hiding riches that perhaps we do not realise we are in danger of losing.
What I am saying is that I would like to encourage those of us fortunate enough to have access to a multidisciplinary academic environment to present their results before a wider audience within the biological sciences, and to discuss experimental protocols, and even field trials, with those outside their immediate disciplines. Already the ongoing project on family poultry with the Animal Production and Health Section of the Joint FAO/IAEA Division is being run with a holistic approach.
This has the advantage that the different factors affecting the poultry are not considered in isolation. For example, people working on viruses are talking to people working on worms (even if they donÎt always agree). But I am suggesting that we go one step further, and instead of just talking to other people working on poultry, we talk to those with a more theoretical interest in biology. If we tap existing resources in the more theoretical biological sciences, we could save ourselves a lot of work in the scientific study of the populations of fowl that are such a valuable resource to rural families around the world.
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