Review by Kathy Lyon (Click on stars for an explanation)

This book is Out of Print.

With 21 contributors, this book covers a variety of aspects of animal growth. The book examines growth from the molecular level, including hormones and growth factors, of both food animals and companion animals. This book will be of greater interest to someone in the food animal field. The section on companion animals is relegated to the last few pages with a single paragraph each for ferrets, rabbits, and caged birds (parakeets, budgies, canaries, and parrots). Cats have about a page; dogs have slightly over 5 pages.

Presented here are the fundamental concepts of growth: growth curves, and cell/tissue changes. Methods are introduced to measure body composition and growth in order to assess animal growth potential. Modeling growth, sex-steroids, ß-adrenergic agonists, antibiotics, somatotropin, and transgenic animals, as well as immunomodulation of growth, are topics of interest.

This is a book targeted at animal researchers, teachers, and upper undergraduates/graduate students in agriculture and animal science. There are photos and drawings as well as charts and tables.

Blackwell Science publisher. Distributed in the USA by Blackwell Publishing (2003).

Hardcover, 408 pages.

ISBN-10: 0-8138-2906-2.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8138-2906-7.