The benefits of living with lions

A press release discusses the trade-off between lions and livestock around the Waza National Park in Cameroon. The people who live closest to the park enjoy the best access to grazing and water. But they also suffer the most depredations. Counterintuitively (at least at first glance) trying to chase the lions away increases predation. The authors ((L. Van Bommel, M. D. Bij de Vaate, W. F. De Boer, H. H. De Iongh (2007) Factors affecting livestock predation by lions in Cameroon. African Journal of Ecology 45 (4), 490–498. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2028.2007.00759.x)) suggest that the activity scatters the herd, making it easier for the lions to pick off one of the animals. Staying cool when your flock is under attack is probably hard to do. But it would be easy, I would have thought, to at least take advantage of the disaster and eat the victim, if you can chase away the lion after the kill. But no. “We can’t eat the meat, as Muslim traditions require animals to be killed by a Muslim,” one of the villagers told the researchers. Yay God!

More methane please, we’re Vermonters

The state of Vermont in the US would likely greet Luigi’s news about less flatulent fodder with horror, if there were any Acacia or Sesbania there. Vermont has one of the fastest-growing alternative energy programmes in the US, all based on the prodigious output of its vast dairy herd. Better yet, methane is a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So burning methane is win-win: less methane, and less carbon dioxide than non-renewable power-station fuels. via Grist.

Cutting down on cow emissions

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and ruminant farm animals belch out a huge amount of the stuff. No wonder people are scouring agrobiodiversity for animal feeds that minimise emissions. A paper in Animal Feed Science and Technology ((C.R. Soliva, A.B. Zeleke, C. Clement, H.D. Hess, V. Fievez and M. Kreuzer. In vitro screening of various tropical foliages, seeds, fruits and medicinal plants for low methane and high ammonia generating potentials in the rumen. Animal Feed Science and Technology. Corrected Proof, Available online 18 October 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anifeedsci.2007.09.009)) has come up trumps. The researchers found differences in methane production not just among tropical feed species, but also among accessions of Acacia angustissima and Sesbania sesban. Something to add to the list of evaluation descriptors.

Turning market waste into meat and milk

A recent paper  in Animal Feed Science and Technology ((C.B. Katongolea et al. (2007) Nutritional characterization of some tropical urban market crop wastes. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anifeedsci.2007.09.002)) did a number on three different kinds of waste from the markets of Kampala, Uganda. Waste from banana, sweet potatoes and Solanum aethiopicum (African eggplant) were chemically analyzed and fed to sheep and goats. That way, the scientists could measure what the wastes contain and how much of that the animals could make use of. Turns out — surprise — that there are differences among the wastes and differences between wet and dry season wastes. Banana leaves and pseudostems were not all that nutritious, and African eggplant leaves were very watery. But sweet potato leaves were just right: “sufficient to provide the CP (crude protein) and ME (metabolizable energy) required by growing goats under tropical conditions”.

Which is nice to know, but not all that surprising, given that about half the sweet potato crop in China is fed to livestock. Of course, pigs are monogastric, while sheep and goats are ruminants, so it was worth checking.

Will this see the market people of Kampala bundling sweet potato waste for sale? Or maybe the farmers will grow the leafy varieties specifically for animal fodder.