Some aspects of the stress responses to road transport in thoroughbred horses with special reference to shipping fever

Abstract

We performed two sets of experiments consisting of 36 hr and 41 hr of transportation to elucidate the road transit-induced stress response's profiles in horses with clinical signs of respiratory disease ("affected" horses) and horses without clinical signs of respiratory disease ("unaffected" horses). In both sets of experiments, "affected" horses showed a significantly greater increase or decrease in levels of the indices of the stress response, i.e., eosinophil count, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, levels of serum glucose, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and 11-hydroxycorticosteroid (11-OHCS) than " unaffected" horses after road transportation. Compared with "unaffected" horses, "affected" horses had a different pattern of changes in indices of the stress response, suggesting that they failed to adapt to transportation.