Castration is a common husbandry practice carried out in most cow-calf herds, and the latest Canadian cow-calf survey carried out by the Beef Cattle Research Council in collaboration with Canfax had several questions pertaining to this subject.
About 600 producers responded to the online survey from across Canada. Slightly more than 80 per cent of producers used band castration as their primary method for castrating male calves, while another 18 per cent of producers used surgical castration.
It was very encouraging to see almost 85 per cent of producers across Canada were castrating calves at some point between birth and three months of age. This percentage was even higher in respondents from the western provinces.
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It has long been established that one of the best ways to minimize pain and distress is to have castration done as early as practically possible. The code of practice for the care and handling of beef cattle is currently undergoing an update by the National Farm Animal Care Council, but the 2013 standards clearly state this as a requirement.
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The survey also asked respondents about their use of pain mitigation at castration, and once again the results were highly encouraging. Almost half of respondents reported using pain control products in calves at castration.
Slightly more than 26 per cent reported using some sort of pain control product all of the time; another 20 per cent reported using pain control depending on the age and method of castration.
This percentage is significantly higher than in previous surveys and demonstrates many producers have seen the benefits of using pain control at the time of castration.
The majority of the producers who used pain control products were using anti-inflammatory drugs, although almost 11 per cent also reported using local anesthetic nerve blocks.
A recent paper in the journal Translational Animal Science provides good evidence about the effectiveness of using local anesthetic blocks in addition to an anti-inflammatory drug at the time of castration. The study was conducted by Dr. Amanda Bernier and Dr. Diego Moya from research performed on calves at the University of Saskatchewan’s Livestock and Forage Centre of Excellence.
The animals in the study consisted of 40 Hereford-cross bull calves that were about two months old at the time of the study.
They were all surgically castrated, and all received the anti-inflammatory drug meloxicam just before castration.
Many studies have also shown these types of anti-inflammatory products help to reduce pain for some time after castration. The researchers wanted to examine if there was any benefit from using a local anesthetic in addition to the anti-inflammatory drug to determine if there were additional pain control benefits.
The calves were randomized into two groups, and although all calves received the meloxicam injection, only half received a nerve block of lidocaine.
It is a local anesthetic, similar to the injection your dentist would use to numb your mouth or what your veterinarian would use to block the side of a cow before performing a caesarean section.
The researchers also included a buffer with the lidocaine to reduce the stinging effect of injecting the medication.
Using a multi-dose syringe, four millilitres of lidocaine were injected into the spermatic cord area on each side of the scrotum.
Although it would have been ideal to wait five to 10 minutes after the injection to allow the block to really take effect, the researchers realized this was probably impractical in most cow-calf operations at processing time. Therefore, the surgical castration was carried out 90 seconds after the injection of lidocaine.
The researchers examined a number of behavioural outcomes, such as a visual analog scale in which an observer rated the calf’s pain response and counted behaviours such as tail flicks and foot stamps.
All these pain indicators were significantly lower in the calves that received the local anesthesia. In addition, during the first hour after castration, calves that received the lidocaine spent more time lying down and less time standing than the calves that received only meloxicam.
Finally, when calves were moved from the holding pen back to the pasture, those that received local anesthesia moved significantly faster and stayed closer to their dams than the calves that received only the anti-inflammatory product.
It should be noted many producers have seen similar differences between calves that receive anti-inflammatory products compared to calves that don’t receive any pain mitigation. It is quite impressive that we see an additional benefit when using local anesthesia on top of the anti-inflammatories.
In my experience, once producers start to use pain control products such as anti-inflammatory drugs in their calves at castration, they rarely stop using them. The differences in behaviour are usually obvious to the producers, and they often say calves move better and pair up faster after processing.
However, this study showed an even more significant benefit with a fairly simple and inexpensive method of local anesthesia. The effect was obvious, even though the researchers chose not to slow down the processing by waiting a long time for the anesthesia to take effect.
