Zoohygiene

(animal hygiene), a science concerned with the effect of maintenance conditions on the health and productivity of animals.

Zoohygienic measures based on observation and experience were carried out in ancient Egypt, China, India, Greece, and Rome. Zoohygiene developed further as a result of the capitalization of agriculture that began in England at the turn of the 16th century. In the second half of the 18th century, zoohygiene questions were discussed in a number of Russian economic publications and in individual works on agriculture by A. T. Bolotov, M. I. Livanov, G. I. Kutepov, V. I. Vsevolodov, and others. Early in the 20th century, the scientific studies on zoohygiene were generalized by the German scientist M. Klimmer in his Veterinary Hygiene (1908).

The needs of socialist livestock raising stimulated the development of zoohygiene in the USSR, especially in the zoohygiene subdepartments of veterinary and zootechnical institutes and the laboratories, all of which were established in 1930. Soviet zoohygienists worked out scientific microclimatic standards for various species and age and production groups of animals. They studied the hygienic properties of material used for bedding and the methods of storing and disinfecting manure. They solved many problems of the evaluation of fodder quality, the sanitary evaluation of water supplies, the hygiene of maintaining and feeding pregnant animals, and the raising of young animals.

The most important concerns of modern zoohygiene are the setting of zonal zoohygienic standards for the microclimate in livestock barns and standards for the planning of livestock sections and installation of utilities, the study of optimum sanitary conditions with different systems of maintaining animals, and the study of ways to improve the quality of food rations, feeding norms, and zoohygienic methods of evaluating feeds and water. The principal methods of study used in zoohygiene are statistical, sanitary-inspection, and experimental. The V. I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences plans research in zoohygiene and introduces the results into production. The research is carried out in the all-Union institutes of veterinary sanitation, experimental veterinary medicine, and livestock raising and in university zoohygiene subdepartments and other research organizations. Research in zoohygiene is sponsored by the all-Union scientific methods commissions for the coordination of research. Articles on zoohygiene are published in Soviet and foreign livestock-raising and veterinary periodicals.