STUDYING CAECOTROPHY BEHAVIOUR (COMPLETE AND CENSORED) IN THREE RABBIT BREEDS AT FOUR SEASONS USING DIFFERENT SURVIVAL TECHNIQUES

ABDALLAH, FATMA; GHARIB, HEBA SAID

doi:10.21608/avmj.2023.224964.1170

STUDYING CAECOTROPHY BEHAVIOUR (COMPLETE AND CENSORED) IN THREE RABBIT BREEDS AT FOUR SEASONS USING DIFFERENT SURVIVAL TECHNIQUES

Document Type : Research article

Authors

FATMA ABDALLAH ¹
HEBA SAID GHARIB ²

¹ Department of Behaviour and Management of Animal, Poultry and Aquatics, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Zagazig University, Egypt.

² Department of Animal Wealth Development, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Zagazig University, Egypt

10.21608/avmj.2023.224964.1170

Abstract

Studying different rabbit behaviour is helpful in the management and breeding process. Caecotrophy behaviour and the time taken by animals to do it is an important point to be taken into consideration for its major benefits for animals. Survival techniques are the suggested statistical methods to study the time taken by animals to do this behaviour. This study depended on the observation of 96 animals of (Newzealand, California and Rex) breeds at four seasons. The results showed that the median is better than the mean as a descriptive measure. The overall median of caecotrophy time of the three breeds at different seasons was 14 sec (95% CI = 5.46 – 22.54), 15.66 sec (95% CI = 9.45 – 21.87), 11 sec (95% CI = 0.43 – 21.57) and 17.66 sec (95% CI = 10.11 – 25.21) for spring, summer, autumn and winter respectively. Log-rank (Mantel-Cox) test is significant (0.027*) among the three breeds (Newzealand, Calfornia and Rex) at spring season. Also, caecotrophy survivor functions were highly significant 0.001**, 0.033* and 0.023* among the breeds of rabbits for summer, autumn and winter respectively as their P- values were less than 0.05. The -2 Log Likelihood = 272.308 (Chi-square = 14.306 with P-value = 0.003**) for cox proportional hazard model is highly significant. The significance of the model indicated fitness of this model for the prediction of the effect of predictors on caecotrophy time. Feed consumption showed a significant effect in the model and showed an increase in the probability of taking fecal matter with increasing feeding intake.

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