The Importance of Healthy Drinking Water for Animals

Water is the source of life. This is true for both humans and animals.

1. The importance of animal drinking water health

For animals, water is an indispensable and irreplaceable nutrient, It has the functions such as body temperature regulation, nutrient transport, biochemical reactions, lubrication and protection,etc. Animals survive for only a few days in extreme water shortages; but they can survive for weeks without feed. Therefore, adequate drinking water is very important to maintain the health of animals.

But in reality, the problem of drinking water is often the most easily overlooked. In order to ensure that animals can grow healthily, water quality testing is required. The following is an example of pig farm drinking water quality testing.

2. How to test animal drinking water quality - taking the pig farm as an example

We generally judge from the aspects of sensory properties, general chemical indicators, bacteriological indicators and toxicological indicators.

First, we use a white bucket to collect the water, and preliminary judge the freshness, turbidity, and whether there are visible objects, peculiar stink or peculiar smell.

The general chemical indicators and toxicological indicators need to be sent to professional laboratories for testing, including total hardness, total soluble solids, chlorides, nitrates, nitrites and mercury, arsenic, lead, manganese, etc.

The total number of bacteria is an important indicator for assessing the quality of water. When the numbers of bacteria is excessive, it can cause diarrhea, disorders of nutrient absorption and other diseases in pigs (especially nursery pigs). Through the test by total bacteria, it is also possible to assess the cleanliness of the farm’s water line. If the water pipe is not installed (such as a dead water line) or the water line is not cleaned after drinking water, it is easy to cause the formation of biofilm in the water supply system. Biofilm is an ideal place for bacterial growth, especially when the water temperature is above 20 °C, the bacterial reproduction will be very quickly.

3. Characteristics of animal drinking fountains

In order to ensure the health of the animals, we often use some drinking utensils. For example, in a pig farm we will install pig poultry automatic nipple drinker. The characteristics of the nipple drinker are: it can meet 10 to 15 pigs drinking water. The nipple drinker is mainly composed of a valve stem, a steel ball and a drinker body. When the pig drinks water, the valve stem is arched upwards, and the two sealing rings formed by the valve stem and the steel ball are lifted, the water flows out through the staggered gap. When the pig leaves, the steel ball and the valve stem automatically return to normal position, then the water stop supply. When using a nipple drinker, the pressure of the main pipe should not exceed 19.6 kPa, otherwise, the water will be sprayed when it passes through the drinker, which is not good for pigs drinking water.