Page 222 - The Welfare of Cattle

ranGe beef CoW and CaLf heaLth and WeLfare 199

scrutinized occasionally. Some sick animals will hide from sight, a normal response of sick wild
animals trying to avoid being seen by predators. In such cases, disease may be severe and chronic
before it is identified, and it is common for ranchers to discover that a calf has died rather than hav-
ing the opportunity to treat it.
One of the reasons horses are ridden when managing a herd of beef cattle is that the cattle do
not move away from another four-legged herbivore. Cattle and wild herbivores see and respond to
people on foot and people on horseback differently. Cowboys not only use horses for convenience,
but also because they can manage cattle more easily and in closer proximity on horseback, more
easily identifying sick animals. Cattle can be “gentled” to accept humans in closer proximity, and
some producers make efforts to do this in order to make handling during cattle processing easier,
but in general beef cattle on range are not managed very often by people on foot.
All disease problems represent significant animal production issues, and some present signifi-
cant welfare problems. Undeniably, any animal with an illness or injury is compromised to some
degree. On the other hand, animals with different diseases do not suffer equally. There is a big
difference between diseases that damage sensitive tissues and cause pain, compared with diseases
where tissues may not function well, but where the problem is relatively imperceptible to the animal.
For example, diseases that damage the musculoskeletal system not only impair the animal’s ability
to move and get feed and water but also cause overt animal suffering. By contrast, many diseases
of the reproductive system affect sperm or ova production or the rate of fertilization, but do not
affect the animal’s overall well-being. Such problems limit the animal’s productive capability, and
typically lead to culling, but affected animals can be otherwise physically fit and overtly healthy.
As another example, many infectious diseases are subclinical in affected animals, meaning that the
animal carries the disease agent and can potentially infect other animals, but otherwise show no
signs of disease or physical impairment.
The challenge that all cow/calf producers accept is to implement preventive and monitoring
practices that strive to assure good animal health, welfare, and productivity. For subclinical diseases
that affect animal performance, testing programs are instituted to identify the problem and control
or eliminate it. When overt clinical disease occurs, producers need to identify and treat it, or, if
untreatable, to euthanize the animal.

heaLth PrOBLeMS OF COWS aND BULLS

As is true for other populations, including humans, mature cattle are larger, more robust in the
face of environmental challenges, and more resistant to disease problems than babies or young
growing adolescents. On the other hand, they have some other liabilities that come with aging.
Relatively few beef cows experience problems that cause extreme suffering or risk of death.
The overall death rate of cows in beef herds is commonly about 1%, quite close to the death rate
in human populations. Extreme weather, such as blizzards or extreme cold can injure or kill adult
cattle, but this level of weather challenge is unusual, and it is typically the younger animals that
experience frostbite, death by hypothermia, or respiratory disease associated with extreme dust and
wind. Nevertheless, of the 1% of cows that die on ranches, approximately 16% of these deaths are
attributed to weather-related causes such as lightning, chilling and drowning.
As noted above, the main reasons for culling beef cows are reproductive failure or old age. The
causes of reproductive failure include disease, but while reproductive diseases produce infertility,
it is unusual for reproductive disease to cause animal pain or suffering. If worn teeth are seen as a
disease, then it is the most common disease of old beef cows, leading to loss of body weight. Cow
body condition, which equates to amount of muscle and body fat, is visually appraised when cows
are checked for pregnancy at the end of the breeding season. Such thin cows are unproductive and
are culled before the condition leads to suffering or risk of death.