Assessment and economic evaluation of sheep reproduction efficiency, challenges and mitigation strategies in Kajiado, Kenya.

绵羊和山羊的有效繁殖使牧民能够生产用于食品生产的动物，但也确保他们每年都有新的幼畜来取代他们的旧的生殖牲畜(母亲)。然而，不同的疾病、气候变化因素(如干旱)和其他挑战可能会干扰绵羊和山羊怀孕或分娩健康新生动物的能力。这种负面影响可能会对牧民产生重要后果，他们可能没有足够的后代出售，因此无法产生足够的收入来维持家庭或生计。在极端情况下，他们将无法取代他们的生殖雌性牲畜(母亲)，这意味着他们的牛群规模将减少，削弱牧民未来恢复和生存的能力。因此，必须确定那些可能对这些动物的繁殖产生消极或积极影响的因素，并估计这些因素可能产生多大影响。这可以通过繁殖性能指标(例如，羔羊出生死亡的百分比或母羊每年在羊群中产羔的百分比)来实现，这些指标可以提供信息来衡量繁殖能力的变化。然而，肯尼亚的绵羊和山羊牧民没有关于这些指标的信息，这是监测他们的情况和确定问题或成功的障碍。这里提出的研究旨在产生关于不同绵羊和山羊群体繁殖性能指标当前水平的基本知识，然后可以作为参考，以确定哪些牧民更有可能失去他们的动物，哪些牧民表现更好。这将通过扫描现有文献、约谈主要专家和约谈牧民来完成。我们将测试气候变化因素(如动物的大量流动性、难以获得水或新鲜牧场或冲突)、社会经济因素(如牧民的性别或抚养人数)、牧民的建议渠道类型、感染情况或现有创新是否有能力影响这些生殖指标的水平。我们还将利用这些知识进行经济分析，以估计绵羊或山羊繁殖能力变化造成的经济损失或收益。此外，我们将测试六种主要疾病，这些疾病会影响绵羊和山羊的繁殖力，但也会感染人类并导致疾病。因此，研究结果将产生一个基线知识，以指示可能的干预或研究领域，以帮助牧民提高绵羊或山羊的繁殖力。该项目将代表肯尼亚内罗毕大学和英国皇家兽医学院的研究人员和学生之间的多学科合作。

Effective reproduction of sheep and goats allow pastoralists to produce animals for food production, but also to ensure that they have new young animals each year to replace their old reproductive livestock (mothers). However, different diseases, climate change factors (such as drought) and other challenges can interfere with the capacity of sheep and goats to get pregnant or to deliver a healthy new-born animal. Such negative impacts can have important consequences to pastoralists, who may not have enough offspring to sell and therefore will not generate enough income to sustain their family or livelihood. In extreme cases, they will not be able to replace their reproductive females livestock (mothers), meaning that the size of their herd will decrease, diminishing pastoralists capacity to recover in the future and to survive. For this reason, it is essential to identify those factors that may have a negative or positive impact on reproduction of these animals and to estimate how much of an impact these may have. This can be done with indicators of reproduction performance (e.g. percentage of lambs born death or percentage of ewes lambing per year in a herd) that could provide information to measure changes in reproduction capacity. However, information on these indicators is not available for sheep and goat pastoralists in Kenya, representing a barrier to monitor their situation and to identify problems or successes.The study proposed here aims at generating the basic knowledge on the current level of the reproduction performance indicators for different sheep and goat herds, which could then be used as a reference to identify those pastoralists more at risk of losing their animals and those better performing. This will be done through scanning of the available literature, interview with key experts and interviews with pastoralists. We will test if climate change factors (such as large mobility of animals, poor access to water or fresh pastures or conflicts), socio-economic factors (such as gender of the pastoralist or number of dependents), type of advice channels to pastoralists, presence of infections or existing innovations have the capacity to influence the level of these reproduction indicators. We will also use this knowledge to conduct economic analysis to estimate the financial losses or gains due to changes in the capacity of reproduction of sheep or goats. In addition, we will test for six major diseases that affect sheep and goats' reproduction capacity, but that can also infect and cause illnesses in humans.The results of the study will therefore generate a baseline knowledge to indicate possible areas of interventions or research that could help pastoralists to improve the reproduction capacity of their sheep or goats. The project will represent a multi-disciplinary collaboration between researchers and students of the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and the Royal Veterinary College in the United Kingdom.