Filthy Pigs Good, Gassy Sheep Bad

Farm animals really don't have a whole lot going on in the way of table manners. But there are two items of note that relate to behaviors in livestock that socialized humans try to avoid:

It turns out that a filthy pig is a healthy pig. And since sheep haven't figured out how to follow up their constant belching with a simple "excuse me" or, better, a "hey, sorry about the greenhouse gases, my baa-aad," scientists are looking to build a less gassy sheep.

First up are the filthy pigs. Sitting neatly alongside a study we wrote about last week regarding the benefits of letting the kids get a little bit dirty, we learn from Nature of a study performed in the UK that links a good porcine wallow with a healthier immune system.

The study that began with a test population of newborn piglets determined that compared to clean piglets, the dirty ones developed helpful bacteria early. These in turn helped to put into permanent place a stronger immune system for later life. The study is described as among the very first that has determined a link between environmental factors, genetics and immunity.

Meanwhile, herders and scientists in Australia are hard at work trying to come up with a less gassy variety of sheep, and it's not because all the burping offends anyone's delicate sensibilities. As PhysOrg reports, nearly 10 percent of Australia's greenhouse gas emission comes from livestock, and most of that is emitted as sheep belch. The gases that a sheep burps up contain a lot of methane, a far more powerful greenhouse gas compared to carbon dioxide.

In an effort to reduce the sheep's contribution to the problem, scientists are isolating individual sheep (hundreds of them so far) and measuring their output. It turns out that there is a wide variety among sheep in terms of how much methane they will belch, so the hope is to find and subsequently breed those sheep that consistently produce less methane.

Photo courtesy of Jim Champion, via Wikimedia Commons