What is heat stress?
Compared to other animals, sheep cannot sweat very effectively to cool themselves, so their main source of cooling is through panting.
How susceptible is your flock?
Sheep and goats tend to be more resilient to heat than cattle, haired sheep are more heat tolerant than wooled sheep. However, there are a number of climatic conditions that can have an influence on heat stress. These includes ambient temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and night time temperature.
There are also a number of different animal factors that will influence an animal’s heat load:
Symptoms of heat stress
The earliest indicator of heat stress in breathing rate. For sheep, this is >70 breaths a minute.
