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- [00:06]
A
Hi, 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. Morning, Dustin.
- [00:11]
B
Good morning, Philip.
- [00:13]
C
Hello, guys.
- [00:13]
A
Bob.
- [00:14]
D
Good morning, everybody.
- [00:15]
A
And our guest today is Dr. Christine Navarre from Louisiana State. Good morning, Christine.
- [00:20]
E
Good morning.
- [00:21]
A
How are you this morning?
- [00:22]
E
I'm great. Warming up a little bit here today. So much better.
- [00:26]
A
Good. Yes. We're going through a little bit of warm up, but I bet we'll go through some cold again before we get through the win. But we're happy to have you on today because we actually had a listener question that we wanted you to address relative to liver flukes. And we'll talk about some emergency preparedness, which I know that's one of your areas of expertise. So we want to figure out what we can do to kind of be prepared for those emergencies before we get into those topics. As we address this listener question today, we always enjoy getting those. So if you have a listener question for us, you can send one to us at bciasu. Edu or. Or reach out to us on social media. We also have a weekly E blast that goes out that if you want to shoot us an email, we'll get you on that listserv as well. Before we jump into Our topics today, Dr. Navarro, tell us a little bit about you.
- [01:17]
E
Yeah, I was born and raised in Louisiana. I'm a Louisiana State University vet school graduate from many, many years ago. But I'm currently the extension veterinarian for the LSU Agricultural Center. I'm in the animal science department on campus.
- [01:33]
A
Excellent. And I've enjoyed working with you over the years because you always have such a practical perspective on approaching problems dealing with herd issues. And that's why we wanted to get your insights on these topics. But before we jump into the scientific topics, I have an important question that I'm going to ask these guys first, and then you're going to give us the real answer. And the question for you guys is, because she's a Louisiana native, what's your favorite Cajun food?
- [01:59]
D
You know, but I can't even say them right.
- [02:03]
A
And she's going to make fun of you for that, and that's okay.
- [02:05]
D
Yeah, that's what I'm kind of nervous about. Etouffee or. How do you say it?
- [02:10]
E
Etouffee. Good.
- [02:11]
C
There you go.
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D
Yeah, I like that.
- [02:12]
C
I don't know. I haven't had a whole lot, but good gumbo or a crawfish boil. I've had those. Those are pretty good.
- [02:20]
B
Yeah, I'm not big into the Cajun food, being from the Midwest, but, you know, I've had a few of the. The broils, I guess, and those are.
- [02:27]
D
Pretty good, where they just throw out the paper and everything.
- [02:29]
B
Everything out there, yeah. That's really good.
- [02:32]
A
Or the jambalaya. The jambalayas, yeah. Christine, what's the. What's the answer for you?
- [02:36]
E
Pretty much all of those. I love bog crawfish.
- [02:39]
A
The.
- [02:39]
E
The cold weather is gonna really set our crawfish season back, but that's okay. They'll. They'll come back, so. Love crawfish.
- [02:46]
A
That's it. Yeah. We don't have a lot of those native here in Kansas, so we'll have to come down to visit you to have some of those.
- [02:54]
E
So.
- [02:54]
A
So I wanted to jump into this question. And the question was from a veterinarian, and he was working with a producer, and he was at a feedlot. And they had a couple cattle that they lost a few weeks apart. And the animals were bigger animals, had a little bit of jaundiced liver or a little bit of yellowing to the liver and some of the tissues. One of them had liver spots and what we would call a port wine colored urine or kind of a reddish urine. So concerned about liver function, they did some further diagnostics and they found some bacteria there in the liver. The question from the producer was maybe this was liver fluke damage. I think these cattle came from an area where liver flukes occur. Is this possibly an old injury that has recurdesed or come back, or is there something else? We thought of you, Christine, because we know you've got a good understanding of liver flukes. So maybe just tell us about liver flukes and a little bit about them to start, and then we'll jump in to directly address this question.
- [04:04]
E
Yeah. So liver flukes are a parasite that is in certain parts of the country. It is kind of unique compared to our other parasites in that there's a snail intermediate host. And so you've got to have the snails, the right soil, the right temperatures to kind of keep the snail going so that you have endemic flukes. But we have that in a lot of part of the country. And what happens is those flukes, they get into the GI tract and they eventually work their way to the liver, and they migrate around the liver and cause damage. And. And they can. That can lead to a clostridial infection, clostridial hemolyticum, and that can be deadly to those animals. So the signs that are talked about here with you Know, the red urine, acute death, jaundice could certainly be. That doesn't look like there were active lesions in the livers, but there could have potentially been some liver damage. And if that liver damage is bad enough and you're not getting a lot of oxygen and, you know, those animals are really, you know, they're getting fat, their metabolic rates probably pretty high, then potentially it could be there are some other differentials out there, but this could be. And even if those animals, you know, a lot of places are not giving cattle clostridium hemolyticum vaccine, depending on the clostridial vaccine that they got, it may or may not have included clostridium hemolyticum. So that's something to look at. The other thing is, were they actually treated for liver flukes at arrival? And that would be a question, you know, to try to decrease the chance of this happening. One of the things that we don't really know about is whether or not we have resistance to flukes. In the US we, to the two products that are available right now, we have Albendazole or Valbazin, and then we have Ivermec with chlorgilon or Ivermec plus. And in other countries where it's documented there is resistance. And so we would love to be able to find that out here, but those are really hard things to do.
- [06:11]
A
Well, and I think you bring up a couple of good points there, that a typical deworming strategy does not include a flucoside unless you put a flucoside in it. Right. So a lot of our dewormers don't have that capacity to get those unless you're planning on doing that.
- [06:26]
D
Well, and this is why it's fun and interesting to have friends that are veterinarians in other parts of the country or producers in other parts of the country. Because in Kansas, really, for the most part, we don't have the environment where we're going to have cattle become infected with flukes. However, we have feedlot cattle in Kansas that come from all over the country. And so occasionally a Kansas veterinarian or someone in other parts of the country where flukes aren't active will see cases because the damage can last a while. So one of my questions to you, Christine, is, so I'm a feedlot operator in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, someplace where we really don't have flukes, but I buy cattle from all over. Two things. How common is the problem? Should I add a fluke treatment to all arrival cattle? Just arrival cattle from some parts of the country, or is it rare enough that I'll just occasionally see a problem? And even if I put the fluke treatment in at arrival, if those cattle came in with damaged livers, does that do any good? So I asked you about five questions there, so you can answer however you want to do it.
- [07:32]
E
Yeah. One of the things that's important is the timing of the. Of the treatment. So, you know, if you're. You're buying calves, you know, during the fall run, and they're coming potentially from a fluke area, particularly in the south, that would be, you know, at arrival, would be a good time to try to maybe treat them for flukes. I think, you know, you've got to look at your data. I know. I tried to find. I thought it would be easy to figure out how many livers were condemned from flukes versus abscesses. And that's really, really hard to come by. You can get total liver condemnations, but you really can't get it broken out. And if it's out there, it's really not publicly available. So that's a hard question to answer. I think you got to really look at your, you know, your necropsies. I mean, obviously, two animals with these prices, it makes everybody cringe. But you've got to weigh the risk versus the economics of that. If you're deworming anyway, and there's some crossover and the cost is the same, why not throw in that, you know, those products that also get flukes.
- [08:38]
C
A couple questions for you, Christine. One, when cattle arrive to the feed yard or background or whatever, can. Can you tell whether they're infected? Can you do a fecal sample and look for eggs like we would for other intestinal parasites? And then the second question in the listener question, they said these cattle were like 13-1400 pounds. So my guess is they've been on feed for a long time to get there before they are in Nebraska before. So how long is that liver damage last? How long did. Do animals ever recover from it, or how long does that take?
- [09:14]
E
Yeah, so the first question on the diagnostics. Yeah, that would be something that you could do. I think it depends on how old those cattle are. And again, the time of the year. So just. And you'd have to do multiple samples and kind of look at the trends over time. But if you've got some positives, then yes, definitely you've got fluke. So there is a. There's. It's a special technique that you have to do. But most diagnostic labs, if you ask for that are going to be able to do that technique. If you don't find it, it doesn't mean that you are absolutely assured that you don't have them because if they're immature and not producing eggs yet, they're still causing damage. So it's not foolproof. But, but especially if you're getting cattle that are a little bit older then, you know, if you're getting, if you're getting yearlings in, you should be able to see it on your weaning aged calves. You might miss it a little bit. The liver damage, you know, we know that the liver is pretty good. Once an insult is gone, the liver's pretty good at regenerating a little bit and going back. So it really kind of depends on how bad the damage was. Those liver spots, you know, that's potentially something else. There could have been a toxic plant exposure. There could be something else. You know, I'd really want to see histopath to say how bad the damage was, to say, yeah, there's enough damage there to, you know, the size of the liver. So a little bit more information before we could really say what's going on.
- [10:49]
A
And just to clarify, in this particular issue, so there'd be nothing. Sometimes we look at animals outwardly and say they look like they're, they have parasitism, internal parasites, Long hair coat, rough hair coat thin, and it's a gas. Certainly if you find flukes or parasite eggs in the feces, you've got them. If you don't find them, as Christine said, they're not. That doesn't tell you as much. The other thing I would say is in this particular case, the signs that they were seeing was potentially a bacterial infection in the liver that had started with those tracks, which could have started from scarring from the flukes, even if the liver was healing going back. So I think great questions there relative to flukes. And in this case, you'd want to try to prepare for what's next. I'd also work through other potential differentials which could have caused liver damage, could have been related to abscesses. There are some other diseases that we talk about that can damage the liver and, or the spleen, the blood circulating system. So the area which we've talked about, anaplasmosis, would be on the list. So investigating that certainly clostridial disease, which we discussed, a very interesting case. And thanks for sharing that question and your insights on that, Christine. The other thing I'd like to shift to talk a little bit about is emergency preparedness And I know one of the things, and in fact I first started interacting with you was right around the time of Katrina because I was in Mississippi and you were in Louisiana. And as that came in, there were a lot of issues that arose post storm. And you did a lot of work working with producers going through that process. And I'd like to maybe start out with asking what are a few tips or tricks, whether you're preparing for hurricane, fire, flood, tornado, things that we don't know when or where they will happen, but they may happen to our operation. What are some of the things if someone asks you about emergency preparedness on a cow calf operation?
- [12:48]
E
Yeah, I think about, you know, what are, what are going to be the needs of those cattle, you know, right after a storm, that or a fire or whatever that we can prepare for ahead of time. So thinking about, first of all, water, how would you get water to cattle? We've got to keep them hydrated, low stress cattle handling. So anytime we get one of these big events, cattle are stressed. You may be having to move cattle and you may have to relocate them, you may have to commingle them and anything. All of our herd health programs, when we talk about vaccination and nutrition and all those preventive herd health programs, that just leads to resilience. So those cattle are much more likely to come through one of these events if they're already in good condition and have a really good immune system. So low stress cattle handling is part of that, I think really, really important. How are we going to get feed to these animals? Trying to avoid feed changes. So, you know, are they going to be on pasture? We with all this cold weather, our rye grass right now looks really bad. And so people are putting out some, some sac feed for a few cows. And you know, we want to be real careful about that. So again, just trying to minimize that, making sure that we are going to prepare for power outages, communication, so battery backups for your cell phones, if cell phone doesn't work, knowing how to do WI fi, calling, cash, having cash. So when you have widespread power outages, I use my credit card for everything now, but it doesn't work when there's no power and you need to buy fuel, making sure you've got a generator that works, making sure that you keep fuel available for that. Those are, you know, some of the things. Making sure your record keeping is up to date and that it's stored somewhere appropriate in the cloud. So all of your cattle records need to be in the cloud. All of your personal Family records, all of those things. It's real important that you are able to get to get to those things. So those are just some of the things to. To think about.
- [14:53]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of good information there. It's hard to keep up on all those long term. Right. You know, if something. So if it's a hurricane you're like okay, I better start to get stuff ready. A lot of times here we have a tornado and I better get stuff ready maybe 15 minutes. Right. So you should have all those pre beforehand. And Dustin, I know you had some thoughts on emergency preparedness.
- [15:16]
B
Yeah, I was install this topic for today and I went out and just did some searching. There's quite a bit on different land grant universities websites on being prepared. So I would encourage you to go out and take a look. And in particular one at Nebraska that talked about well, floods and fires, not hurricanes.
- [15:33]
A
Yeah, surprising. They get rare hurricanes in Nebraska but.
- [15:37]
B
It was broken out into what to do before, during and after. And so I thought that was pretty nice. And so I thought a lot more about the what to do before. You know, communication plan, developing response plan. You talked about kind of a disaster kit or whatnot. So some of those kinds of things. Making sure your employees know the first.
- [15:56]
A
The first thing she mentioned was water and water is a hard one. What are you guys, Bob and Philip. How do I get prepared for if I'm. And let me give you a scenario. I water the cattle typically out of automatic waters and off a well and if I have power, go out for days, how do I prepare for that?
- [16:15]
D
I think that's one that people really should think about because water consumption, that's first thing that cattle would run into trouble. I mean they can go a few days without feed, they can't go very long without water. And so if you know that, you know you've got well based water, I think you've got to have some backup, some backup generator to get the well going again or, or a way to get them to surface water or something like that. And a lot of times so in our part of the country it may be really bad snowstorms or ice storms or something like that where now moving the cattle becomes a real challenge. So maybe I'm forced to keep them where they are, but we don't have power. And so I think that's something that really everybody should have thought through is how are we going to get water.
- [16:57]
C
I think there's. I mean the other one you didn't mention is it takes a lot of work but some ag tanks and be able to haul water from a city source if need be so that you can keep water to cattle. Because you might be in a situation where that's the only option or in certain situations that that could be your only option.
- [17:16]
D
But I've been around Scott Fritz enough to know never, never, never in a chemical tank.
- [17:21]
C
Yeah, don't use the same. I was going to say the same thing.
- [17:24]
E
Make sure you're not using one that's hauled pesticides or fertilizer or something like that.
- [17:29]
C
Or it's, you know, a dedicated water tank. But it could be necessary.
- [17:35]
D
But you know, in my experience over the years, you know, I've seen tornadoes hit cattle operations a couple of times. I've been aware of one client who had a barn fire and a few cattle and you know, things like smoke inhalation as well as burns were just so thinking about disasters is really the, the discipline to kind of be prepared for things that you can't prepare for. And I do think that water is a good place to start, but feed is the other one. And just figuring out a, again, it's not necessarily the long term ration that you want cattle on, but something to get them through an emergency and be prepared for that.
- [18:10]
C
Well, Dustin mentioned people and so when I was at Florida we had a hurricane come close. It didn't hit the research station but we had a plan in place that you know, here's the phone lines of communication, here's who's responsible for doing X, Y and Z. So they know that they have to try to get there and who's the backup because people in that situation, people have their own homes and families and other things that they are also focused on trying to take care of. And so you need to have a plan if of who's doing what so that everybody knows and things make sure that they get taken care of.
- [18:49]
A
I think that's an excellent point.
- [18:50]
E
That's absolutely critical to have backup plans for the people and your ranch plan. And you know, if you're a veterinarian helping ranchers or our jobs, it's to prepare ourselves too so that we weather whatever storm and you know, the best we can so that we're able to go and, and do our jobs. So very, very critical point.
- [19:15]
A
Yeah, I think even in a family operation where you think the lines of communication might be clear, sometimes that's where they're the least clear because it's not sure who's going to do what and where are they going to do it. I think that's important. And your point, I don't want to slip up on because I think what you just said, Christine, is also really valuable of. You got to take care of yourself. Yes. We're trying to take care of the animals and do everything else, but these times can be highly stressful and you're dealing with everything else on the. On the outside as well.
- [19:46]
E
Yeah, yeah. And one other thing is when you're in that situation, and especially for things that, you know, y' all deal with a little bit more, maybe, you know, fires, tornadoes, where you don't have any warning, is have a checklist. And there's a lot of resources out there. There's, you know, examples of those everywhere, have that checklist. So you're not having to think about what you need to do. You can go down that checklist and go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Because when you're stressed and you're trying to remember, oh, what do I need to do? You don't want to have to do that.
- [20:17]
B
So I think she also mentioned one good point about record keeping. We talk a lot about record keeping. Not from this aspect, but, you know, you keep your records, which probably also includes your insurance stuff, and you want to make sure that's also in the cloud, as you mentioned. So it's not.
- [20:31]
D
Possibly you might be able. You might need to be able to identify which cattle are yours, because with fences down and things like that, insurance, those are the types of things I don't think of, or having my cell phone charged or, you know, those are easy to kind of overlook and then kind of regret.
- [20:49]
A
Well, and document everything. Right. So in the after part, cell phone pictures, take pictures of everything because it's cheap and easy. And I don't think you're ever going to regret having a whole bunch of pictures of. Here's what happened on my operation. So.
- [21:04]
E
Yeah. And, you know, we talk about branding for a lot of reasons, but it's really the only thing that cattle rustlers can't cut out. And we have had that problem after storms with people coming in and taking advantage of the situation. And, you know, with cattle prices these days, that's. That's something to think about.
- [21:23]
A
Absolutely. Making sure that you've got track of them and your records will help you with that a lot, regardless of the situation, of knowing what you had and where it was. But you have to keep up on it all the time because you don't know when one of these events is going to occur. Christine, we really appreciate you joining us today and your insights on the flukes and talking about some of these issues relative to emergency preparedness. And I encourage everybody to just think about what am I going to do in that situation. I like your idea of having a checklist or a plan, and some of the specific issues like water I need to have thought through. What am I going to do if the power's out for days and how do I handle that? And it may be very different in the summer versus the winter, depending on what type of event you have to deal with, both based on water consumption and availability. So appreciate you sharing with us, and if you have a listener question for us or anybody has a topic you'd like us to discuss, you can email us@bcisu.edu.