review · Antioxidants
Heat stress represents an escalating global issue that results in significant economic loss across the commercial rabbit sector. Rabbits exhibit heightened vulnerability to elevated temperatures compared to other farm livestock because they possess fewer sweat glands and a dense coat of fur, which impairs their capacity to dissipate heat effectively. Prolonged exposure to heat stress undermines rabbit productivity, meat quality, reproductive success, immune responsiveness, antioxidant defences, intestinal structure, and gut microbiome balance. In response, dietary supplementation with diverse nutraceuticals has emerged as a promising strategy. These compounds, spanning vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fatty acids, organic acids, enzymes, prebiotics, probiotics, synbiotics, and medicinal plants, help preserve baseline biological processes, bolster the immune system, and stave off disease, thereby countering the performance deficits induced by heat.
Rising temperatures present severe challenges for animal welfare and agricultural viability. Because rabbits are especially prone to thermal distress, finding effective dietary interventions helps maintain animal health, sustain farm yields, and safeguard meat production under challenging climatic conditions, offering livestock producers practical ways to support herd resilience.
The findings point to commercial opportunities for animal feed manufacturers and livestock producers seeking dietary additives to protect rabbit herds from high temperatures. Formulations incorporating vitamins, antioxidants, probiotics, or medicinal plant extracts could be deployed as functional feeds. Because the work is a review of existing evidence rather than a product trial, commercial applications remain at an applied research stage requiring formulation testing and field validation on farms.
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Heat stress has become a widespread concern worldwide, which is a major environmental stress that causes substantial economic loss in the rabbit industry. Compared to other agricultural animals, rabbits are more sensitive to heat stress as they have fewer sweat glands and a thicker coat of fur, increasing the heat dissipation complexity. Thus, heat stress hurts rabbits' productivity, meat quality, reproductive performance, antioxidative properties, immune responsiveness, intestinal histomorphology, and microbiome. Nutraceuticals include vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, organic acids, fatty acids, probiotics, prebiotics, synbiotics, enzymes, and medicinal plants due to the possible impacts on maintaining common biological situations, strengthening immune response, and preventing illness, which ultimately led to an increase in productivity. Nutraceuticals have recently attracted a lot of attention to alleviate the adverse impacts of heat stress in rabbit farms. The objective of the current review is to provide acquaintance with the recent findings about the impact of heat stress on rabbit productivity and the advantages of dietary supplementation of nutraceuticals in mitigating it.
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DOI: 10.3390/antiox12071407
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