With all the time and effort it takes to measure and manage pain in cattle, one might ask, “Why bother?”
Aside from basic empathy, ethics, and the duty of producers to their animals, there are two big reasons: Consumers care, and comfortable animals are less likely to get sick and die.
“In most cases, consumers and livestock producers have similar concerns, but their perspectives on those concerns are quite different,” said Dr. Hans Coetzee, professor of veterinary medicine at Kansas State University, during a recent seminar.
“Why do consumers care about [livestock pain]?”
He answered his own question, saying celebrities and animal rights groups have been “raising the profile” of painful procedures like castration and dehorning in the general public.
Animal welfare is a growing concern among consumers, even though it is not a top priority when making food-buying decisions. Younger consumers are especially concerned about animal welfare. Specialty production programs such as Whole Foods’ 5-step GAP labels are an example of retailers trying to meet that demand.
But mitigating painful procedures has practical value to the industry as well, Coetzee argued. He discussed several experiments on feedlot animals received as either steers or bulls. In these experiments, steers acted as the controls.
Animals received as bulls were castrated, but randomly assigned groups were either given the analgesic meloxicam before the procedure or not. The bulls given the meloxicam before being castrated developed bovine respiratory disease (BRD) at a far lower rate than did those castrated without pain relief. The bulls given meloxicam before castration had BRD rates roughly half that of the untreated bulls, and much closer to the rates of animals received as steers.
BRD is the biggest single economic threat to the cattle feeding industry. According to the recent USDA Death Loss in U.S. Cattle and Calves report, roughly a quarter of all non-predator cattle deaths are because of “respiratory problems,” of which BRD is the primary culprit. When looking specifically at feedyards and stocker operations, respiratory problems account for as much as 65 percent of the losses experienced.
“So, the take home is that analgesia may be a lot less challenging and a lot more profitable than you might think,” Coetzee concluded. “There are benefits not only to the animal because they are in less pain, but also benefits to the producer because these animals show less signs of disease and improved weight gain.” — Kerry Halladay, WLJ editor
