Livestock Management RANCHING
Tips to Avoid Stressed, Sick Calves By Gary DiGiuseppe F
OR THE MOST PART, DISEASES THAT AFFLICT CALVES AREN’T present at fi rst in the fi eld. They’re brought there by other animals.
The exceptions, says Dr. Mark Spire, D.V.M., tech-
nical services manager for Merck Animal Health, are the clostridials or blackleg family of diseases. That includes C. perfringens, which is a scours or a sudden death organism. But other than that, says Spire, very few disease-causing organisms are in the ground itself. “The rest of them come from the cow,” he explains. “They’ll either come from her intestine, obviously on the scours side of things, or they’ll come from her nose and saliva, for the respiratory side.” As cows are moved onto the pasture, the numbers
of pathogens in that environment start to build. To re- duce that threat of these pathogens to the calves, one tactic would be to spread out the cow herd. If smaller pastures make that unfeasible, the producer
should try to reduce the number of cattle in the calving area, or to expand the calving area to a bigger area. Spire says research conducted in Canada has shown
that disease problems increase if the density in the calv- ing area is more than one cow unit per 1,000 square feet. In addition to the problem of an increased pathogen
load and more calves in close proximity to it, protec- tion provided to calves by their mothers through the colostrum is uneven. Spire says there will be some variation of protective immunity across a set of calves. “As an operation increases the number of potentially susceptible animals in an area, we see a buildup of the
48 The Cattleman February 2014
number of organisms within an environment. This imbalance between bugs and calves can quickly create a situation where we’ll start seeing disease outbreaks, either scours or respiratory disease,” he says. Spire says the disease outbreaks tend to vary with
age. From the fi rst 3 or 4 days on up to the fi rst 3 weeks, there are more digestive problems with calves. Then, from the fi rst 3 weeks up to 6 weeks of age,
problems with a scours producing organism called coronavirus will emerge, as will C. perfringens out- breaks. “The Clostridium perfringens organisms are powerful toxin producers,” Spire says, “and what we’ll tend to see is either a bloated calf that will generally die within 24 hours, or calves will just be found dead without prior signs of being sick.” When the calves are examined postmortem, the most
frequent trauma detected is a large stomach ulcer that either killed the calf by rupturing, or by the release of the clostridial toxins. “That’s a loss of a nice-doing calf,” he notes, “typically around 6 to 8 weeks of age.” When the calves are around 10 to 12 weeks of age,
various organisms that cause pneumonia tend to take hold. Spire says those are mostly summer pneumonias, but they can also be seen from Christmastime through the fi rst of the year in herds that started calving in late August or early September. “Again,” he says, “these are all population man-
agement problems because we start getting too many susceptible animals of the same age within a given timeframe, at about the time the population of re-
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