Assessment of transport stress on cattle travelling a long distance (˜648 km), from Jessore (Indian border) to Chittagong, Bangladesh

Alam, Mahabub; Hasanuzzaman, Md; Hassan, Mohammad Mahmudul; Rakib, Tofazzal Md; Hossain, Md Emran; Rashid, Md Harun; Sayeed, Md Abu; Philips, Lindsay B; Hoque, Md Ahasanul

All collected data and laboratory data were entered into Microsoft Excel 2007 and data integrity was checked. Data were then exported to the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences V.16 (SPSS V.16) software for statistical analysis. Qualitative traits like types, number and location of injuries and physical conditions were compared by McNemar's chi-square tests for paired samples. Comparisons of the quantitative parameters of serum and blood analysis between before (0 hour) and after transportation (13.8±0.9 hours and 37.8±0.9 hours) were performed using repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by post-hoc tests for assessing pairwise comparison. The paired t test was also applied to assess the mean values of cortisol between before and after transportation. The variations of different parameters were considered significant when the P values were <0.05. The results are expressed as frequency number, percentage, mean and sd. As the floor and wall characteristics, space for animals, provision of feed and water, and other management aspects of transportation were very similar between vehicles, no confounding effect by type of transportation vehicle was therefore expected on the occurrence of outcomes. Therefore, the transport vehicle was not considered as a confounder in the statistical analysis. Transport/vehicle was not considered as a clustered variable because animals within each vehicle were not assumed as homogeneous. Therefore, no random effect of transport was expected in data analysis.