Effect of dietary inclusion of live microbial cultures on faecal glucocorticoid metabolites in safari asian elephants

Wildlife tourism has been shown to increase stress in a variety of species and can negatively affect the survival, reproduction, welfare, and behaviour of individuals. The use of faecal glucocorticoid metabolites has favoured the development of non-invasive methods to study physiological conditions and could aid in successful and effective strategies for the management and conservation of endangered species.

An experiment was conducted to determine the effect of dietary inclusion of live microbial cultures to find patterns of physiological stress hormone in faeces of 18 safari Asian elephants of 30–62 years age and body weight (3495 ± 133.34 Kg) for two months. They were randomly divided into three groups, with six elephants in each, i.e. control with no probiotic (T₁) and the other two with probiotics, which contained 1 * 10⁹ CFU/g concentrate of Lactobacillus acidophilus (T₂) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (T₃) @ every 50 kg body weight per day. Faecal samples were taken on 0, 30^th, 40^th and 50^th day of the experiment.

It was observed that the mean faecal glucocorticoid metabolites, demonstrated by the elephants of T₂ and T₃ groups were not significantly (P>0.05) different from the control group (T₁) and remained unaffected on the supplementation of live microbial cultures.