Gezahegne Mamo

Working Equids of Ethiopia: Determination of Body Parameters and Assessment of Factors Affecting These Profiles in Apparently Healthy Working Equids Gezahegne Mamo

This MSc thesis is all about working donkeys, horses and mules in different altitudinal locations of central Ethiopia around 200 km radios from the capital Addis Ababa. As very well recommended by several reports, determination of body parameters for all domestic and wild animals is very important for clinical diagnosis of pathological conditions with reference to these normal physiologic parameters. Therefore this study was meant to study how the profiles of working equids of Ethiopia look like in their apparently healthy state. The study also tried to evaluate the effects of some basic factors which are believed to be incriminated to affect these profiles. Among these factors age, sex and altitudinal differences were the major ones included in this study. It is recommended by the author that using these references values as basic reference data to diagnose day to day clinical cases in Ethiopia and other tropical veterinary clinics can help the veterinarians and other veterinary clinic workers to be reasonable in their diagnosis than using the already used to be Europe based reference limits of the temperate zones.