Castration of male animals is a common practice in the meat industry aimed at reducing aggressive behavior, preventing unpleasant flavor, and controlling undesirable breeding.  For many years, mechanical castration and surgical castration have been practiced to sterilize the animals.  However, these castration methods are not humane because of the associated risk of death, pain, and stress.  Recently, immunocastration targeting the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis (HPG) axis has been reported as an animal-friendly approach that circumvents many of the concerns with conventional castration, and suggested by researches as an alternative to surgical castration.  However, there is no compilation of updated information on the use of immunocastration in sheep and goats.  Therefore, this review aims to summarize the developmental process from traditional surgical castration to immunocastration and to screen the process of immune targets.  It also compares the respective advantages and disadvantages of traditional castration technologies and immunocastration, in particular including analyses in the characteristics, features application and welfare benefits of immunocastration in sheep and goats were also analyzed.

Antibacterial effect of cinnamon oil combined with thyme or clove oil was studied in this paper. Agar dilution method wasused to determine the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of the essential oils (EOs) of cinnamon, thyme, and cloveoil against three Gram-positive bacteria (Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus cereus, and Staphylococcus aureus), and two Gramnegativebacteria (Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium). The results showed that cinnamon was a promisingantibacterial substance with MIC ranged from 0.1 to 0.4 μL mL-1 for the five bacterial species. Agar dilution checkerboardmethod was used to test the combined antibacterial effect of cinnamon oil with thyme or clove oil. Combination ofcinnamon and thyme oil showed an additive effect against all selected bacteria, and combination of cinnamon and cloveoil displayed an additive effect against B. subtilis, B. cereus, S. aureus, and an indifferent effect against E. coli andS. typhimurium. Furthermore, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) measurement was used to analyze thecomponents of the EOs, and the main components of cinnamon, thyme, and clove were cinnamaldehyde, thymol, carvacroland p-cymene, and eugenol, respectively.