Advances in Studies on Livestock Grazing Behaviour in Grassland Ecosystem

Grazing behaviour including behaviour of foraging,walking,ruminating,drinking,resting,excreting is mainly composed of foraging and ruminating behaviour.The interrelationship between grazing animals and forage was illuminated in this paper.Grazing may affect the growth and development of forage by decreasing leaf area index(LAI).Grazing is an artificial disturbance,which affects sward composition and community structure.High stocking rate may result in grassland degradation.Under grazing conditions,forages have two kinds of surviving tactics: grazing avoidance and grazing tolerance.Grazing animals select forages or the part with high appetite because of the high multi-variate species in the sward.Many kinds of methods for calculating intake were introduced,including the magnitude of the difference between pre-and post-grazing herbage mass and the duration between the measurements,through internal or external markers to calculate faecal output or through grazing time,bite rate and bite mass to calculate intake.Measurement of botanical composition of herbage eaten is the nodus all the time.Many methods have been tried,such as manual observation,rumen extrude or faeces detection,examination of oesophageal-extrusa samples and n-alkane technique.