Bioenergetics Of Wild Herbivores

Book excerpt: Bioenergetics is an emerging discipline which offers a more profound understanding of the ecology, behaviour, and evolution of wild herbivores. Increasingly, bioenergetic principles have been applied in management since they provide insight into population dynamics and are relevant to manipulation of habitats and assessment of the impacts of resource development. Growing interest in the agricultural potential of wild herbivores has provided further impetus. In spite of this promise, there are few comprehensive syntheses of the concept and its application to wild herbivores. This volume attempts to fill this need. This book provides a great amount of detail but its expressive aim is to lead us to the whole animal, to a herd, to population as integral parts of an ecological entity which in turn is the result of evolutionary forces.The concept of this book promises the realization of an overdue change in the approach to bioenergetics, to nutrition and husbandry, and thus to the management of wild herbivores: the final emancipation from rules and views based primarily on domesticated herbivores or on experimental animals held under unnatural conditions, necessarily impending them behaviourally, physically, and psychically.