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The current livestock production is facing with challenges such as increasing requirements for animal health, welfare and food safety. Under the influences of global climate change, solutions for improving robustness of animal itself to environmental effects have attracted much more attention of research than trying to modify external environments. Robustness can be defined as the ability of an animal to keep production performance, reproduction, health and well being stable in a diverse environment. In addition, a robust animal can take short time to adapt to and recover from external stressors. However, robustness is a complex trait and is difficult to quantify and phenotype. Meanwhile, as far as we know, almost perturbations have influences quickly and sensitively on the amount of animal’s voluntary feed intake. Researches have shown that voluntary feed intake of pigs decreased due to infection, tropical climate, bad sanitary conditions and lameness and tail biting. Moreover, with the development of modern technology such as feeding station, voluntary feed intake now can be measured easily, routinely, individually and in a large group of animals and can be used as an indicator of perturbation.

Therefore, the aims of our thesis are:

• Quantifying and characterizing the responses of growing pigs in term of resistance and resilience to perturbations regardless of the origins.
• After being able to characterizing animal’s response to perturbations, the procedure will be applied for different types of perturbations (without and with the origin) and for different individuals and groups of growing pigs.
• The procedure will be also challenged with different types of perturbations to detect the shared and unshared responses.

Hieu Ngyuen Ba is working on this subject of thesis since the 1^st december of 2016 for 3 years. He is supervised by Masoomeh Taghipoor in the team Physiology of growth and quality of products.

Thesis co-funded by #DigitAg.