Standardized body condition scoring system for tropical farm animals (large ruminants, small ruminants, and equines)

In tropical regions, subject to significant fluctuations in feedstuffs, the body condition score (BCS) is a relevant indicator for monitoring body reserves status of farm animals. However, the most used BCS grids comes from temperate conditions and still not adapted for tropical species, which limits adoption and usefulness. The current work presents for the first time an original, low-cost, standardized BCS assessment system, suited to a large spectrum of tropical farm animals (zebu and/or crossbred cattle, buffaloes, camel, sheep, goats, horses and donkeys). Based on a rigorous set of uniform criteria for practical, easy-to-use on field conditions, the animal model used to calibrate and validate each grid is the adult female (except the male for horses and donkeys). A six-point BCS grid system is proposed (i.e., from very emaciated -0- to overweighed -5- body conditions), based on visual interpretation of the back and right-lateral sides of each animal. The overall BCS assessment criteria is built on three major anatomical regions (hindquarters; thorax and abdomen; shoulder and neck), and ten related anatomical landmarks, which provide a unique consensual global interpretation of the back and right views. On-field tests of the proposed BCS grids for each animal species revealed acceptable reproducibility with regard to the most conventional, established gold-standards BCS methods (r² = 0.67-0.99). The proposed harmonized BCS is relatively simple and must facilitate the adoption of regular, accurate BCS assessment by adequately trained operators linked to tropical animal production environments.