Comparison of comprehensive health score in North American housed giraffe and free-ranging giraffe from South Africa
As in humans, stress is evident in many animal species and has been correlated to disease prevalence; yet a value for reliable quantification of chronic stress is unestablished. During stressful events, allostasis, an adaptive process, is initiated by physiologic systems to maintain or reestablish homeostasis to protect an organism’s viability. Over time, the acclimation to frequent stress causes systematic dysregulation, leading to the phenomena of increased allostatic load. In recent studies, allostatic load has been assessed in animal species via