The animal: Options for managing intake

Managing voluntary feed intake of grazing animals is essential to maximise returns and to meet market specifications. Restricting nutrient intake is successfully achieved by controlled grazing management techniques and with feed additive use in intensive feeding systems. Increasing feed intake in the long-term will be a greater challenge to research. The is considerable potential with existing genotypes of sheep to increase intake, because intake appears to be limited by a lack of hunger drive rather than by limitations due to tissue energy transactions or gut load. Increasing voluntary feed intake will be successful if we can increase the hunger drive within the brain. Increasing the hunger drive may be achieved by decreasing the metabolic satiety signal arising front tissue transactions, by reducing the magnitude of the satiety signals arising from the gastrointestinal tract or by modifying neurotransmitters within the brain to enhance the hunger drive.