Neuroethological assessment of stress condition : its development andapplication.

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Animal welfare is one of the subject on which social interest has recently been focused. To provide scientific view on this important matter it seems essential to establish an objective as well as feasible means for assessing the stress condition of a given animal. An interaction among the immune, neuroendocrine and autonomic nervous system has been established based on the large body of information accumulated during the last decade. According to this concept, when animals are subjected to an immunological disturbance such as infection, information from the immune system is transmitted to the thermoregulatory, neuroendocrine and autonomic systems to cope with the crisis most efficiently. Experimentally, the administration of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), an endotoxin of gram negative bacteria, has been shown to induce febrile responses, to activate the hypothalamo-pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis, to suppress physiological systems such as gonadal and thyroid functions, and to cause tachycardia in various species of animals. To understand the immuno-neuroendocrine mechanism underlying the pathophysiological responses to various stressors, it is important to clarify the interactionhs among immune, neuroendocrine, thermoregulatory, autonomic and behavioral responses of individual animals. However, available information is limited about these interactions. This is partly because most previous studies were carried out in laboratory rodents and thus there were experimental limitations for simultaneous measurement of various parameters due to the small body size. In the present study we therefore atttempted to establish a suitable research model for assessing the neuroethological responses to the experimentally induced stress, such as that induced by LPS administration, with neurophysiological, endocrinological, immunological and behavioral parameters by using the Shiba goat as an exprimental animal.