**3. Results**

Among the respondents, 77.4% were veterinarians and 6% were animal care takers or technicians. From the total number of participants, 31% were conducting research activities and 15.5% were animal facility managers (multiple roles possible). Most of the respondents were working at academic institutions when the survey was conducted (71.4%), 15.5% were working at private companies, while 13.1% were working at other types of institutions.

The personnel's experience, together with education and training, being a very important factor when performing in vivo research, the participants were asked about their previous experience working with sheep. According to their answers, at the time that they filled out the questionnaire, 63.1% had worked with sheep for at least 5 years, 28.6% for 1–5 years and 8.3% for less than 1 year. The majority of institutions or companies where they were employed (86.9%) had more than 5 years of experience in working with sheep, 8.3% had used sheep for 1–5 years and 4.8% for less than 1 year.

When asked about the number of animals used/year, 29.8% of the respondents reported between 1 and 20 animals, 26.2% were using between 21 and 50 animals, 14.3%, 51–100 animals and 27.4% more than 100 sheep/year.

In order to have a more precise overview of the sheep biomedical studies, the survey also aimed to identify the experimental field in which the animals were used; the answers are illustrated in Figure 1.

**Figure 1.** Main field of research using sheep (multiple answers possible).

When questioned about the origin of the sheep they were using, the respondents reported purchasing the sheep either from local farms (59.5%), commercial breeders (19%) or had their own flock (21.5%).

As the sex bias in biomedical research is an important topic that has been frequently addressed lately [4], the sheep users were also asked about the sex of the animals they used for their studies. The majority were using females (79.8%), 19% used neutered males, 16.7% intact males, while, for 19%, either the sex of the animals was not important or animals were selected based on availability. For this question, multiple answers were possible and thus the percentages add up a total of 134%, indicating both female and male (both intact and neutered) were used by some institutions.

Regarding the age range of the sheep at the beginning of the study, 46.4% of the respondents were using animals that were 1–2 years old, 33.3% older than 2 years, 32.2% younger than 1 year old, while 13.1% did not consider this to be important or used the animals that were available. Multiple answers were possible, and, based on the total percentage (125%), sheep of different ages are used by some respondents. Approximately half of the respondents (51.2%) did not have any preference for the sheep breed.

The main criteria for choosing a sheep supplier has not been reported in biomedical publications so far. The respondents were asked to rate several criteria in the order of importance. The animals' health status ranked first, followed by their availability, the trust and experience in the sheep provider and the animal homogeneity/uniformity (Figure 2).

Only 51.2% of the participants had a health monitoring program for their sheep. Among the diseases for which the animals had been screened, Q Fever was the most frequently cited. Half of the respondents reported that they were vaccinating their sheep (overall, almost one third had vaccinated against clostridia).

When asked if they had encountered problems in their sheep not related to the experimental protocol, 57.1% answered positively and, except one participant that reported problems at lambing, all the others mentioned health problems in the comments section for this question.

More than half of the respondents did not know the current purchase cost for their sheep; 67.9% could not estimate how much they would be willing to pay for a sheep with a controlled health status. The other 32.1% proposed prices ranging from EUR 50 to 1000.

**Figure 2.** Main criteria for choosing a sheep supplier (several options were possible, rated from 5 (very important) to 1 (not important)).
