Effective pain management in cattle plays a key role in supporting recovery from illness. The easiest way to treat pain is to begin with the cause. Many painful conditions are caused by misinterpretation of the animal’s needs in the housing conditions. Veterinarians play a key role to assess those needs and provide comprehensive advice in order to increase farm performance and animal welfare.
Pain management in cattle
With the development of cattle farming and increasing awareness around Good Farming Practice, pain management in cattle is an emerging topic. For years, people have thought that cows don’t feel pain. Where did this belief come from?
Pain recognition in cattle is extremely difficult since they are masters at hiding pain and discomfort. To make things a little easier, a few methods have been developed to assess pain. Each method has some limitations, especially since we are dealing with non-verbal patients, but it gives us an overview and proves that cattle do indeed feel pain, like every other living being but express it with a different intensity.
Followed by this understanding, we must bear in mind that all the standard zootechnical procedures, such as dehorning, require multimodal pain management.
Integrated approach
Dechra supports you with an integrated approach for comprehensive pain relief.
1 Herd management add
2 Detection add
Recognizing discomfort or pain in an animal is difficult and hard to measure. General signs of pain in ruminants are subtle and include a reduced appetite, dullness, avoidance of human contact, increased body temperature or an increased heart or breathing rate.
3 Therapy add
Limited access to safe pharmaceuticals for food producing species makes effective pain management especially challenging for these animals. For acute pain related to surgery or injury local anaesthetics have shown the best compromise between food safety and efficacy. Dechra is committed towards providing innovative solutions to make effective but practical pain control available to food producing animals.
Practical pain control measurements
Dechra is committed towards supporting veterinarians and farmers to provide practical pain control measurements to food producing animals.
To learn more, download the brochure compiled by Dr. med. Vet. Theresa Tschoner.