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Given the increasing importance of exploring consumers' concerns about the welfare of farmed animals, a survey questionnaire was designed to investigate the role of cognitive styles along with sociodemographic characteristics in consumers' perceptions about nonhuman animal welfare (AW) and their willingness to pay for animal-friendly products. The results revealed that the survey respondents were concerned about AW and had negative perceptions of the way animals were treated. They showed positive attitudes toward some actions to be taken for improving AW and strongly agreed to pay more for animal-friendly products. Consistent with previous studies, results revealed significant associations between sociodemographics and concern toward AW. However, some observed differences were highlighted by cognitive styles rather than by sociodemographic characteristics. These results indicate a significant link between cognitive styles and perceptions and attitudes toward AW, which may outweigh previously found sociodemographic differences and fuel the contemporary debate on AW.

The addition of jenny milk during cheesemaking has been recommended as a viable alternative to egg lysozyme for controlling late blowing defects. However, little is known on the sensory properties of the cheeses made with jenny milk. In this study, the effect of the addition of jenny milk during cheesemaking on sensory properties and consumer acceptability of cheese was evaluated. A sensory profile was carried out by 10 trained panelists on 4 cow milk cheese types. Two types of cheeses were made by adding jenny milk to cow milk during cheesemaking; the cheeses were then left to ripen for 45 and 120 d. The remaining 2 cheese types were made with only cow milk and were also left to ripen for 45 and 120 d. The attributes generated by a quantitative descriptive analysis sensory panel were effective for discriminating the 4 products. Among them, added jenny milk samples aged for 45 d had the highest intensity of some appearance descriptors (structure and color uniformity), as well as the highest intensity of sweetness. The analysis of acceptability data obtained from 89 consumers showed that added jenny milk aged for 45 d was the most preferred type of cheese, whereas no significant differences were found among the other products, which had higher intensity of bitter, salty, acid milk, and so on.

Microwave heating caused physicochemical changes in bovine supraspinatus muscle and influenced characteristically the yield and integrity of the extracted DNA, indicating that an accurate DNA quantification and a rational choice of the genes (i.e. mtDNA versus nDNA, fragment size, etc.) to be amplified are fundamental in an authentication process by PCR-based methods.

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