P. Vindis

Polar Sport Tester for Cattle Heart Rate Measurements

Well-being and health status of the animal in relations to achieving optimal production, become a standard when grading intensive livestock systems. Heart rate and body temperature have traditionally been used as parameters for different animal species health assessment, since they can indicate a problem with the animal. Also, interest for stressrelated research increased in the last decades, resulting in many available techniques, but as stated by (Janczarek, 2009) the simplicity and practical applicability for the average user should be taken into account. According to (Hopster, 1998; Janzekovic, 2005; Aerts et al., 2008) the change of heart rate can be a relevant parameter, when studying the response of the animal to stress. This is in correlation with findings in the humane medicine that variability of the heart rate serves as an important mechanism of the adaptation capability. Reaction of heart is viewed as an objective way of representing the autonomous responses of the nervous system to psychological stressors, associating increased and decreased heart rates with the predominant influence of sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems. Challenges of the environment activate both branches of the autonomous nervous system. This induces changes in the frequency of the heart rate, which is viewed as the index of the psychological influence of outside events (Herd, 1991). Recent findings also demonstrated direct hard-wired linkage between control of cardiac function and animal response (Lefcourt et al., 1999). Most important stimuli for variations in heart rate generally are excitement, stress, exercise, or some kind of altered physical homeostasis. Because of this, focus in research has always been to investigate and monitor changes in the mentioned parameters, aiming to get a strong correlation with health status. This resulted in invention of special devices which rely on heart rate as certainly the most practical means for judging animal’s status. Heart rate monitors have been developed for purpose of fitness in human and equine athletes, but have evolved into modern health status measuring devices. This equipment became recommended and highly advocated tool in illness, disease, or stress diagnostics. Because of accuracy of measurements with Polar Sport Tester (best accuracy in comparison with ECG) (Macfarlane et al., 1989; Hopster & Blokhuis, 1994; Lefcourt et al., 1999) the said finding was taken into account to a greater extent in the analysis of the data of our test.