Abstract

Climatic stress affects various physiological functions in the body and has a negative effect on livestock growth, health and production. Heat stress of high intensity and duration, causes metabolic disruptions, oxidative stress, decrease nutrient intake and immuno-suppression resulting in infections and death. Animals are found to cope up with the adverse effects of stress when the nutritional requirements are not compromised. Challenged by physiological reactions to heat stress, dietary requirements of macro minerals may differ from requirements in thermo-neutral environment. Dietary minerals are an integral part of all biological functions in the animal body The thermal stress imposes some unique metabolic conditions that require elevated dietary cation anion difference, specifically dietary sodium and potassium. Under such circumstances, in order to sustain productivity, suitable nutritional interventions such as dietary cation anion difference (DCAD) should be adopted, with the objective of increasing the dry matter intake (DMI), improve blood buffering, stabilizing ruminal pH and thereby bring about beneficial influence on growth and production.

Keywords : Dietary Cation Anion Difference, Growth, Heat stress, Nutrient intake