In developing countries, the absence of sources of complete and reliable information on herds’ performances brings the research structures and the engineering departments to constitute their own evaluation framework.

Within this framework, the individual monitoring of animals are the method of reference for the data acquisition, in particular for demography (Poivey et al., 1981; Faugère and Faugère, 1986; Landais and Faugère, 1986; Landais and Sissokho, 1986; CIRAD-IEMVT, 1990; ILCA, 1990; Planchenault, 1990; Faugère et al., 1991; Lhoste et al., 1993; de Leeuw et al., 1995; van Klink et al., 1996; Tillard et al., 1997; Metz and Asfaw, 1999).

The individual monitoring consist in following - during a predefined period - a same sample of herds of which whole or part of the animals are identified individually, generally using ear-tags. Enumerators regularly visit the herds (for example, every fifteen or thirty days), count the animals present and note for each animal all the events having taken place between two successive visits (parturitions, deaths, etc.). Individual monitoring generate precise and reliable data. They are well adapted to establish precise technical reference frames of the productivity of breeds or livestock farming systems or to implement field experimentations in rural areas to quantify the impact of interventions or innovations.

Individual monitoring data correspond to repeated measurements on the same animals, which require a particular organization of the survey protocols and the data management and analysis. CIRAD has long experience of this type of survey. The first methodological work was carried out on bovines in the North of the Ivory Coast in the years 1970. This was finalized in Senegal at the beginning of the years 1980 by the development of the PANURGE system (Faugère and Faugère, 1993), used until the end of the years 1990 in several countries (Senegal, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Brasil). Other systems were proposed and used in Cameroun, Chad and Niger (PIKBEU, Planchenault, 1990). At the time of the update of the data-processing tools, a broad reflection was carried out of 1995 to 1999 on the structure of the data bases necessary to the data management coming from the individual monitoring in ruminant livestock herds (Lancelot et al., 1998).

This work led to the development of the LASER software (Juanès and Lancelot, 1999), whose field applications provided many scientific publications.

LASER was written in Visual Basic © and uses a relational data base to the format MS Access ©.

It can manage data of various natures: demography (reproduction, mortality, exit and entry of animals in the herds), productions (milk, ponderal growth, body state), pathologies (symptoms, serologies), artificial inseminations and all kinds of zootechnical or medical interventions delivered on the level of the animal or the herd.

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xavier.juanes@cirad.fr