A study was carried out among sheep farmers in Dhubri district of Assam on socio-economic status and management practices adopted by them. Altogether 120 numbers of farmers were selected randomly from two blocks of this district. The data were collected through personal interview method with the help of a well-structured, comprehensive and pre-tested interview schedule. Most of the sheep farmers were illiterate and belonged to middle age group. Majority (65.00%) of the respondents had agriculture as their main occupation. Majority (73.33%) of the respondents had low annual income followed by medium annual income (22.50%) and high  annual income level (4.16%). The study revealed that sheep were sheltered during night only. There was no separate housing for the sheep alone. Sheep were let loose in the morning and returned back to the night shelter before evening when there was no crop in the field. During flood, the animals were shifted to an elevated area and were mostly fed with tree leaves such as jackfruit, mango, neem, guava, banana, and babool. During rainy season, when most of the fields were waterlogged, they even graze in knee deep condition in marshy land. Due to grazing in marshy land during rainy season, they were highly prone to parasitic infection particularly liver fluke infection. During flood, most of the sheep died due to severe starvation. Majority of the farmers reported two breeding seasons in sheep viz. June-August and January-March. None of the farmers vaccinated their sheep in the study area. Hence, there is an urgent need to adopt improved management practices to exploit the production potential of this local sheep. By adopting improved management practices, better growth could be achieved, which will ultimately increase the income of the rural poor.   

Pruritic skin diseases are common in cats and demand rigorous diagnostic workup for finding an underlying etiology. Measurement of a serum allergen-specific IgE in a pruritic cat is often used to make or confirm the diagnosis of a skin hypersensitivity disease, although current evidence suggests that elevated allergen-specific IgE do not always correlate with a clinical disease and vice versa. The aim of the study was to to assess the possible influence of age, deworming status, lifestyle, flea treatment, and gender on allergen-specific IgE levels and to evaluate the reliability of IgE testing in predicting the final diagnosis of a pruritic cat. For this purpose sera of 179 cats with pruritus of different causes and 20 healthy cats were evaluated for allergen-specific IgE against environmental, food and flea allergens using the Fc-epsilon receptor based enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) test. The results of the study showed positive correlation between age, outdoor life style, absence of deworming, absence of flea control measures and levels of allergen-specific IgE. Gender and living area (urban versus rural) did not seem to affect the formation of allergen-specific IgE. According to these findings, evaluating allergen-specific IgE levels, is not a reliable test to diagnose hypersensitivity to food or environmental allergens in cats. On the contrary, this test can be successfully used for diagnosing feline flea bite hypersensitivity.