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• Stress and health status:

It is necessary to consider that any factor that provokes stress to the boars will also produce a decrease in seminal quality. This effect will be evident 6-8 weeks later. Some factors that produce stress are air streams, wet floor, hard handling of the animals, high noise levels, high temperatures, lack of a minimum space to move. These conditions may carry out feverish infectius processes damaging testicular tissues or causing joint arms that prevent mounting. Such diseases could even be passed via semen.

Inflammatory processes as orchitis, epididymitis or inflammation in accessory sexual glands may provoke temporal or irreversible damage in these structures but  also in seminal quality, according to the intensity of the process. One cause of testicular inflammation is an incorrect posture of animals, like a sitting dog, that makes pressure on testicle and provoke other possible causes are bruises, locomotive pain, gastric ulcers.

In general, any infectious process may affect more or less on the animal health status meanswhile acts directly testicles. For this reason boars must be protected with the necessary vaccines according to the geographical area where the farm is (located)

Endogenous factors

• Genetics:

Some of the genetic origined processes of , which lead to eliminate boars are persistent frenulum and infantile pennis. There is a difference between breeds in testicular size and sperm production ability. There is a high positive correlation between sperm production and testicular weight. is show as well as between estradiol and testicle size.

Regarding other aspect, consanguinity must be avoided between boar parents because it may influence negatively on boar fertility. On the contrary, heterosis enhances fertility by a decrease of abnormal sperm, an increase of total sperm, semen volume and sperm motility. There are also some sperm defects that are hereditary.

• Age:

Once puberty is reached, ejaculate volume and sperm amount per ejaculate increase up to 18 months of age. Then levels are maintained up to 3-4 years of age. beyond that point, a slow decrease in sperm production is observed.