Recommendations for health monitoring of experimental units of calves, sheep and goats

Small ruminants have by tradition been regarded as farm or agricultural animals with very little connection with biomedical research and laboratory animal science. The use of small ruminants in biomedical research, however, has a long tradition and how to produce germ-free goats has been described already in 1913 by. Since the late fifties, several reports on germ-free and gnotobiotic calves, sheep and goats have been published.