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Bull Creep Feeding, Anemia, New Diseases
00:24:47
Welcome to BCI Cattle Chat! In this week’s episode of Cattle Chat, we start by answering a listener question on creep feeding bulls. Next, the crew cover anemia; the causes, effects, and treatment. Finally they discuss investigating new diseases in you...
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
Welcome to BCI Cattle Chat. I'm Brad White. Happy to have you with us and happy to have our crew here in the studio today. Good morning, Bob.
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A
Good morning, everybody.
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B
Todd, top of the morning to you and Philip.
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C
Good morning, everybody.
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B
So we're glad to have you guys for discussion because we've got some follow up. We talked a little bit about creep feeding and bulls and we'll tie in heifers. Today we've got a follow up on that listener question. We're also going to talk about anemia. What does that actually look like in cows and what would we see in the adults and what might cause it? And we're going to wrap up by talking about how to make sure that we know our treatments are working and our disease identification within the herd is working. Before we get into those topics, I wanted to remind you if you have a listener question for us, we sure enjoy getting those and you can send it to us at bcialsu edu or, or you can reach out to us on social media. Guys, we're a couple weeks into the semester. The students are back in town. Everybody's getting back in the groove of school. So you probably know what I'm going to ask you for our initial question right away. And that is if you're home alone and it's just you and you can order your favorite type of pizza, what type of pizza would you order? See, Philip, you already saw this question coming.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
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B
What would be. And you can have up to three topics.
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A
Steaks, Bob, you know, just a good old pepperoni is pretty good, but maybe even better than that is the meat lovers just pile it all on.
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B
Yeah, that's, that's good. And do you have a place that you're gonna get your pizza from? Are you gonna get specialty place, thick crust, thin crust? I need details.
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A
Wow. So thick crust.
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B
You haven't thought as much about pizza as I have.
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A
No, obviously not.
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B
Brad must have been home for a while by himself.
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A
We have two options in, in my town and both are good. So there you go.
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C
You know, I don't know, I'm, I'm probably going to go with maybe, maybe a meat lovers or maybe barbecue chicken pizza. I've had, I can't remember, is it Pizza Hut that has the barbecue? I don't know, maybe more than one does, but. But yeah, I think those are pretty good.
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B
That's different, Todd.
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D
Well, I was spoiled early on in life. I was blessed to be able to spend two years of my life in New York City. And I'm going to tell you there is nothing that compares to New York. Ghetto Slice is the best and it is what's on it, Crust, sauce and cheese. That's is the best pizza you'll ever eat. But since I can't get that in Manhattan, Kansas, I typically go for Papa John's and I usually go for the Supreme.
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B
Supreme.
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D
That's pretty good garlic dipping. Butter is what does it for me though.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Anything to add a little health to the. Yeah, do what we can to support your health. Excellent. Well, let's, let's jump into our first topic which we talked a couple weeks ago and we talked about the potential for creep feeding and it was part of a different conversation. And as part of that conversation, one of the comments that came out was Todd, you said creep feeding can actually help fertility on bulls that we're keeping. So if I'm a purebred person keeping bulls that can help their fertility. And the question came in to say, okay, what is there any data to support that statement? So what did you, what did you find or what were you using to support that?
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D
Sure. I appreciate the that listener question because I do need to clarify a little bit of what I meant by that. There is data out there that supports that practice. In fact, there was a review article published back in 2019 that examined several studies and that look at that exact question. And what I meant by that was that if you creep feed bulls prior to weaning, especially in a purebred outfit where you're trying to sell yearling bulls, they will reach puberty faster than than bulls that aren't creep fed that that pre weaning plan of nutrition really helps to develop testicular tissue, really helps them to reach maturity, sexual maturity at a younger age. And then if you are testing Those bulls as 12 and 13 month old bulls prior to the sale I a higher proportion of those bulls will be already pubertal, which makes that yearling bull test just go a whole lot smoother. That being said, it doesn't necessarily take a bull that would have been subfertile or infertile due to some, you know, acquired or congenital semen defect or other abnormality. It doesn't take that bull and make them more fertile. It doesn't fix that problem. So yes, it does make the yearling bull test seem to go a lot smoother when they've been, when they've been brought up a little bit quicker in the pre weaning period because more of them are pubertal at the bull test. It doesn't necessarily make them more fertile per se. And the danger that you need to look out for is if you feed them too much prior to that bull test, especially post weaning, they may come into that bull test over conditioned. And now we've got too much fat in the neck of the scrotum, got too much fat along the back line. It's harder for them to dissipate heat. And those bulls typically do not test well. And in fact, over conditioning yearling bulls can be a real challenge to fertility. So it's, it's a very nuanced topic.
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C
So, you know, we always, we think about nutrition a lot when we think about puberty and heifers and growing heifers and getting them to the right size and things like that and helping them to achieve puberty at the age that we want. But it doesn't, it seems like that that nutrition connection doesn't is not sex specific. So, you know, good nutrition, early nutrition for bulls can help do the same thing as what we typically think about with heifers.
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B
So, and I think whether we do it creep feeding, pre weaning or post weaning, your, your major take home is they need to be in the appropriate condition and size at the time of the pre breeding exam for heifers or fertility tests for bu. But I want to follow up on one thing you say you said about the over conditioning. And Bob, I'm going to turn to you and I'm going to have you describe the pampiniform plexus because it's one of the coolest areas of, and tell us a little bit about what it is and what's its function.
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A
Yeah, well, one of the things in, in bulls we, we describe it as a pendulous scrotum. So they, they keep their testicles outside the body and it, they're supposed to be like 4 degrees centigrade, which I don't know how many that is Fahrenheit cooler than the core body temperature. So the testicles in you say they.
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B
Were supposed to be at 4, which is just above freezing. They're not supposed to be that. It's not four degrees. Not putting them in a refrigerator. No, no, no.
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A
Four degrees cooler than core body temperature. So they need to be cool in order to function well. And so one of, and there's a couple of strategies that the bull uses to keep testicles cool. But one of them is basically this pampentiform plexus is some veins that circle around the arteries that are going to the testicles. So think of it as a radiator, so that the venous blood is cooler than the arterial blood coming in. And so you do it, you take.
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B
Some of the heat out of the arterial and put it in.
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A
So the blood actually arrives to the testicles a little bit cooler than it arrives to other tissues. Now what Todd was talking about was that's right in that pempinaform plexus, that radiator is right in the neck of the scrotum. So if you insulate that with fat, well, then it doesn't work anymore. And so what you, what you have is testicles that the, the blood coming into the testicles is warmer than it should be. And they're not able to dissipate the heat. And you can. And the heat is one of the things that is a pretty common reason why sperm formation is not ideal. And so you have more abnormal sperm, you have lower fertility. And so getting that balance just right is important. And over conditioned bulls are a problem. And I would say same thing we found in heifers is over conditioned heifers don't breed up quite as well as heifers that are just right. It's the goldilocks principle. I don't want them too thin and I don't want them too fat.
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B
And there's been some work done specifically on heifers looking at creep feeding. And if we have too much fat at that stage, you'll get a deposit in the mammary gland, which can limit lifetime milk productivity. That pre weaning phase is important not to have them over conditioned.
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A
Yeah, and it's interesting, one of the things, and there's several aspects of the research that's come out over the last few years looking at lifetime nutrition. And you know, I've said for years that as long as cattle are out on green growing grass, they've got everything they need, which is probably pretty true. But if you're thinking about springboard calves in much of the country, as we get closer and closer to weaning, as you get into September and October, well, a lot of times we're not talking about green growing grass anymore. We're talking about dormant forage. And the nutritional quality of that diet is, is decreasing. And one of the things that the nutritionists have kind of found is that period of time leading up to puberty is a, is a time when the body is signaling, you know, the onset of puberty. And so if the diet nutrient quality from the forage is declining in our replacement heifers and replacement bulls, sometimes a little bit of a Supplementation to supplement that declining quality forage really helps signal the onset of puberty now and again, both in bulls and in heifers. Honestly, some of the problem comes post pubertal. They've reached puberty and we've kept them on a high plane of nutrition and that's when we can get them over fat. So does require some balance and knowing what you want to accomplish.
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B
And Todd, your, your point in response to the listener question was yes, there is some data that's out there, but it, it could be pre weaning or post weaning. I have to manage that whole period and have an even growth, right?
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D
That's correct. I mean it really is about optimization, not just maximization. And for those who are interested, I did just pull up the review article so that you can go look this up if you would like. And it was actually in 2018. It's a review article by Kenny and Byrne by RNE called the Review the Review the effect of nutrition on timing of Pubertal onset and subsequent fertility in the bull. If you're interested in looking more into that, excellent.
- [10:29]
B
Thanks for sharing. I appreciate that. Follow up question if the, if you have something you'd like us to clarify or if we make a statement, you said, hey, what's your evidence for that? Feel free to send us an email because we're happy to. Happy to follow up and provide more details. Next topic I'd like to discuss, guys, is anemia. So anemia and I'll define and then you guys can fill in some gaps. But essentially we're losing red blood cells for some reason and red blood cells are the primary tool for the body to transmit oxygen to all of the tissues. And so that oxygen is carried by those blood cells. If we have less of them, I'm going to have less tissue oxygenation, which becomes important because if we're thinking about and I want to focus this conversation on adult cows and bulls, but adults in the cows, there are a few diseases that we'll see and a lot of times into this fall season of the year, which can cause anemia. And I wanted to ask you guys what, what are the primary clinical signs that I might see in a cow with anemia? Todd, I'll start with you first.
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D
Yeah, it's a great question because there are several different ways that cows can get anemia. And a classic clinical sign you'll see with a cow that has anemia is weakness, maybe being a little disoriented. And occasionally when they get weak and disoriented, they Become what we call hypoxic, meaning they can't effectively transport blood to their tissues and to their brain. And some cows will respond to that by becoming very aggressive and even to the point of being dangerous. So those are some of the signs you might see in a cow grossly from, you know, from afar as you're looking at that cow, if they go down or heaven forbid, they die, as things you might see grossly from a post mortem standpoint, pale mucous membranes. Occasionally, depending on the type, on the cause of the anemia, you may see what's called icteris, or in human medicine we often refer to it as jaundice, which is that yellow, almost neon yellow appearance to the mucous membranes. So those are all signs that you might see in a cow that is anemic.
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B
So despite what we've said to some cows about their lack of brain, they all have one and they all need oxygen.
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D
That's correct.
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B
So Bob, when Todd says look at the mucous membrane. So we may have a weak cow, a depressed cow, and he said maybe look at the mucous membranes. Cue me in. Where, where do you look specifically on the cow?
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A
Well, for one thing, it's a little bit easier in some breeds or some colors than others. So cattle with a white face, so Hereford, Charlize, some simmentals, those types of things, even around the nose is a mucus membrane that right around the eye is another place or along the vulva. But in white faced cattle, you know, you can kind of tell that they're kind of pinkish. They got a pinkish hue to the nose, pinkish hue right around the eye. And that's the way they're supposed to look. But in origin, normally they, but if they are white, I mean just almost typewriter paper white, that's an indication of anemia. Now so for dark, so black cattle, dark red cattle, things like that, there's more pigment in, you know, they're around their eye, around their nose and those kinds of things. So it's not quite as easy to tell. One area where there's almost never pigment is on the inside of the vulva and that can look really pale. Now the problem is, well, you've got to put your hands on the cattle and really be close to detect that. And so there's some differences between breeds of cattle. It's, it's a little bit easier to pick it up in cattle that are, have less pigmentation and you can kind of tell the difference, kind of a pink versus white.
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B
So Todd, relatively rapid onset to get to this, where we have pale or yellow mucous membranes, how long does it take us to get there from the time the cow started to get anemic?
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D
It really depends on the source of the anemia and the cause. There are only three ways that an animal can become anemic. One is rapid loss of blood, so hemorrhage, and usually that's fairly obvious if you have a cow that's bled a lot, unless it's into an internal body space, in which case it might not be obvious. The second way that animals become anemic is through red blood cell destruction. And this is one we commonly see in cattle where something happens internally in that cow and often there's a parasite involved and their immune system will actually attack those red blood cells and destroy them. And that can take a few days. Sometimes it can happen pretty quickly, but it usually is going to happen over a period of a few days that they're going to become anemic due to increased red blood cell destruction. The third way they become anemic is they actually just stop producing red blood cells. And that's pretty rare in cows. You might see that in like a bovine leukosis case. If they've got severe leukemia, they might stop producing red blood cells, but that's going to take a long time to develop. So depends on the source. Typically it's going to happen fairly quickly over a period of a few days at most.
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B
So a lot of times it can be days to weeks. With some of our diseases like anaplasmosis or the lariosis, be two of the parasite type diseases, that will take us some time to get there. But one of the things that we wanted to talk about today was to make sure you want to observe those cows and see who's maybe lagging behind the herd and they may be worth getting up. The thing I would add to what you said, Todd, of they, they can be very fractious, they can be aggressive. So be careful because if you don't have a lot of oxygen going to your brain, you're not going to make a lot of good decisions, even worse decisions than you normally make, Right. So be careful with them. Also, they have no reserve, which means no oxygen carrying capacity to have exercise. So these are cows that we want to be very careful that we don't run, we don't aggravate, we don't get them coming up sooner. So appreciate that thought. Those thoughts on anemia, guys, and if you want a kind of a backgrounder, the two diseases I mentioned were anaplasmosis and filariosis, which can cause this. We have talked about both those on podcasts previously. If you want to look at one of the back episodes to find out a little bit more about those specific diseases. Speaking of diseases and kind of emerging diseases, I wanted to ask you guys a little bit about the process that we go through. And I want to use the high path avian influenza that we talked about last year, primarily in the dairy industry, that was identified based on abnormal clinical signs. And maybe I'll ask one of you guys to tell us a little bit of the story of what happened and kind of how that progressed.
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A
Yeah, so one of the things that we talk to veterinary students, we talk to beef producers about is most diseases, we, we know what they are and the symptoms, although they can vary a little bit, they, they fall within a range of what we expect cattle to do. But every once in a while, something new comes along, a new disease. And so a little over a year ago, some dairy producers and some dairy veterinarians started noticing cows that just didn't fit into any of the kind of the known problems that they ran into. So they had adult cows that dropped in milk production but didn't appear particularly sick. They had some really ropey. The milk wasn't normal, so it was kind of like mastitis, but it wasn't mastitis. And so it didn't fit into any of the buckets that we kind of have a pretty good handle on in dairy cow diseases. And so then what followed was an interesting kind of gradual figuring out of what was going on. And it started with producers just noticing things that were odd. They brought it to the attention of their veterinarian. Their veterinarian kind of started. Usually we kind of start with the basics and what you expect to see. Well, it wasn't mastitis and it wasn't some of the things we were used to. So then they, the veterinarian started grabbing some samples and sending them to the diagnostic lab. Well, the diagnostic lab, in the same pattern, looked for the, the common things first. And they started ruling out common things. And they're going, huh, this isn't fitting any of the things we thought. So then they dug a little bit deeper and started looking for things that you don't typically look for. And that's when they identified avian influenza in these cows. And it was something we had not seen before. And so it, it, in some ways, it went pretty fast. I mean, you just saw this progression of questions and not the right answers. And then so you asked again, and then passing it up from producers to veterinarians to the diagnostic lab. So in some ways it went pretty quickly, but we're talking about a number of weeks. And during that time it was quite frustrating because the answer was, we don't know what's causing this problem.
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B
So it was an interesting progression as you work through. And Todd, I want to extrapolate from that a little bit and say, how do I know if this is usual or unusual? And maybe that sounds too vague of a question, but what are some of the things? If I'm a producer and I'm out there, how do I distinguish those two to decide whether I need to elevate this problem to the next layer?
- [19:37]
D
That's a great question, because this is something that we encounter commonly where we'll have a disease outbreak. And actually, I think it's more natural than we realize for us to look for some type of a weird cause. In fact, in veterinary school we're often taught that, that when we hear hoofbeats, look for a horse, not a zebra. But occasionally you do find a zebra. And, you know, going back to the case of high path avian influenza, some of the things that kind of led them to test for, for avian influenza were some other things that they were noticing that were going on at the same time on these dairies. They were seeing a lot of dead birds that were in proximity to the dairy. They were seeing actually a lot of cats that were developing severe neurological disease and dying. And even some of the dairy workers are getting a really nasty conjunctivitis or pink eye at the same time that this was all going on. And all of these other signs, I guess, that were more like stripes than they are just simple hoof beats that led them to think maybe this is a zebra. And that's what led them to test for avian influenza and finally discover that that was what was going on. In a typical outbreak scenario. Start with the horses. When you hear hoofbeats, what are the horses? What are the things that commonly cause these types of problems? And start with that, because more often than not it's going to be one of those. But be on the lookout for stripes. Be on the lookout for things that don't fit the typical narrative for how some of these more common production diseases we see occur. And when you see some of those stripes, maybe start thinking a little broader. And really, it's always good to have a broad list of possibilities going into any outbreak situation. You shouldn't be focused in right away. But you also don't want to go overboard looking for things that are really weird when, when it's probably going to be something very similar, but just always, always be on the lookout for those stripes, I guess. Is the, is the take home to that?
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B
Well, I think even, even beyond what you're saying, back to the usual or unusual, it is not just that I can't get so laser focused on, on the outbreak itself that I'm not observant of other things going on. And that could be new source of feed, new exposure to animals next door, new other things that may or may not be relevant. But I can't just focus on the sick animals if I'm trying to investigate an outbreak to determine if it's usual or unusual.
- [22:06]
A
Yeah. You know, one of the things I would encourage producers to do is a lot of times veterinarians have worked their, their producers to have treatment protocols for the common diseases. And so what a producer should look for was what if, what if the animals aren't responding like in the past, hoof problem has always gone away with antibiotics. In the past, this respiratory disease type of a problem has responded well to this. But in this case it isn't. That's anytime something's not acting the way it has in the past, that's a time to, to reevaluate and bring in a veterinarian and start looking it up. And that might be didn't respond to therapy. And in the past they do pretty well or a different age. Gosh, I've never seen it in this young of an animal or this old of an animal or the disease is just lasting longer than normal. So anything that looks outside of what you're used to, because again, if you have cattle and you've been around them a long time, you know there are diseases that cattle get and most of them, they're not, they're not identical, but they're similar. And anytime something isn't similar, that's a good time to bring in and ask the question, is this something different?
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B
Yeah. So the magnitude also impacts that decision of we maybe have a couple cases of respiratory disease, but now we're seeing a lot or the treatment response, which I appreciate as you brought into play that that is makes a difference. I have certain expectations. I do think this is an interesting story of how that investigation progressed and as you said, relatively rapidly. And kudos to the producers, veterinarians and diagnostic lab that picked up on that as they went through and they worked.
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A
Together as a team over time to figure it out.
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B
Well, we have to have different areas of expertise come to play to be able to sort out what it was and at this point as as far as I know, they think it was one crossover event that was actually spread which impacts how we move cattle. What we need to think about when we're bringing them on to different operations. And we haven't seen anything on the Beefords from H Pai the High Path avian influenza, but we have seen other diseases emerge and even this year with filariosis which we just mentioned, we saw cases of that which are presenting. So if it seems like it's out of bounds or out of your normal, contact your local vet and then your local vet may or may not have to contact somebody else to figure out what's going on. But it's worth sharing and discussing for that investigation. Thank you guys for talking about that as well as the other topics. And if you have a question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, you can send us an email at bcisu Edu.