Identification of resilient Texel animals through the study of live weight and feed intake trajectories

In the last few years, the concept of animal resilience has gained increasing attention in livestock production. One of the reasons is the contribution of climate change, which has intensified the frequency and severity of extreme weather events.  In semi-extensive or extensive systems, animals are daily exposed to diverse environmental challenges that are often beyond farmers’ control. Exposure to such challenges can affect animal behavior, health, welfare and productivity. Animals differ in their ability to cope with perturbation, resulting in varying levels of resilience.  Evidence suggests  that resilience has a potential trade-off with production, which means that the intense selection done over the past years for improving productive traits may have reduced animals’ adaptative capacity and robustness. Despite its relevance for commercial livestock systems, resilience is not a directly measured trait, which difficult its quantification. It has been hypothesized that high-frequency data can capture animals’ responses to different challenges, and the expansion of precision livestock farming tools have generated large amount of detailed data, however, the main challenges rely in developing accurate methodologies capable of transforming this kind of data into meaningful resilience indicators. In this sense, the objective of this study was to develop resilience indicators derived from high-frequency body weight and feed intake phenotypes and to investigate the associations with productive traits to explore potential antagonisms. More than 30 resilience indicators were generated using different approaches and methodologies. Results of phenotypic correlation showed that production and resilience have antagonistic associations, particularly when considering residual feed intake trait.