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- [00:04]
A
Hi, welcome to BCI Cattle Chat.
- [00:06]
B
I'm Brad White.
- [00:06]
A
Happy to have you with us and happy to have our crew here for discussion today. Good morning, Bob.
- [00:10]
C
Good morning.
- [00:11]
A
You're the whole crew here in the studio.
- [00:13]
C
It's a little, little lonesome in here.
- [00:15]
A
Yeah. And luckily though, we've got Dr. Fred Gingrich, who's from the American association of Bovine Practitioners, to join us. Good morning, Fred.
- [00:23]
B
Morning all.
- [00:25]
A
So we're happy to have you with us. And we're going to be able to discuss several topics and it's a real privilege because there big continuing education organizations for veterinarians in the country. One is the American association of Bovine Practitioners. Fred is the executive director. The other is the Academy of Veterinary Consultants. Bob is the executive director. So we're going to have a battle, a showdown at some point today, but we'll at least be able to discuss some of the things I'm interested to get your perspective on some of the new things you've heard at some of those meetings. We've also got a question that's been asked about anaplasmosis and how do we prevent it? How do we try to control it? We'll dive into that a little bit, as well as some other health topics. Before we get into those, I want to remind you, if you have a listener question for us, you can send us an email@bcisu.edu. and since I've got both of you here and you guys have both seen a lot of talks and are both familiar with TED Talks, so a TED Talk is a specific topic. You've got an area, you've got something you're going to talk about extemporaneously for a few minutes and be highly passionate about. And I wanted to know if I was recruiting you for a TED Talk, what would be your subject? What's going to be your area of expertise that you're going to talk about passionately for a few minutes? Bob?
- [01:48]
C
Wow. You know, I think it would be the importance of, of sharp tools. I mean, you cannot get through life with dull tools. It just, it's dangerous. It's not fun. So sharpening is the most important skill a man can have.
- [02:03]
A
So you're gonna, are you gonna show people how to sharpen? And like, what tools are you gonna sharpen?
- [02:07]
C
Oh, chainsaws, axes, maybe a chisel. Just all saws, all saws must be sharp.
- [02:14]
A
You gotta keep your saw sharp.
- [02:15]
C
And I've heard that they're gonna, they're gonna assume that I mean something deeper than you know that. Oh, that's an analogy of something really deep. It's like. No, I just really hate dull instruments.
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A
Yeah. No philosophical connotations. Purely just. No, literally sharpen your saw.
- [02:31]
C
Yeah, literally sharpen your saw.
- [02:33]
A
Okay. Now, are you the expert on sharpening?
- [02:36]
C
I'm getting there. I'm not, no, I'm not that good. But it's really important to me. So sometimes I outsource this to people that are good.
- [02:43]
A
So you're going to give a talk on something that you outsource to others?
- [02:46]
C
Absolutely.
- [02:47]
A
Okay. That's right.
- [02:48]
C
Maybe that should be an important part of the talk.
- [02:50]
A
I'm going to give you more background on TED talks. Fred, you have a topic.
- [02:53]
B
I'll go outside of veterinary medicine a little bit, Brad, and say one of the things I'm passionate about is stop listening to the voice in your head. I think that we have a problem in veterinary medicine and certainly within our producers as well on mental health and well being. And I think if we listen to the voice in our head, one of the things I learned one time was we would never be friends with a person that talks about us the way we talk about ourselves in our internal dialogue. And so that would be a quick TED Talk from Fred.
- [03:26]
A
Yeah, I think that is a. A really important topic, Fred. And we. It's not addressed in as widely of a forum and we see that people struggle with some of those mental health issues. I like your, I like your concept of who would you be friends with and would you be. And there's certainly days that probably all of us would not be friends with that voice in our head because it's not saying positive things, but. Right. Some of those we can. There's some retraining that can be done of. Nope, it's okay. This is not the. This is not the biggest deal. If that's the worst thing that happens today, it's going to be all right. Right. And I don't know. I don't know the best way. So what's your advice to kind of replace that voice?
- [04:07]
B
I listened to a podcast one time where the speaker suggested giving the voice in your head someone that you know that has, you know, a unique or a silly voice. So that speaker said that their voice in their head, when they listened to it, they turned it into Alvin the Chipmunk. The voice in my head is Samuel L. Jackson. And so when he's.
- [04:28]
A
So it's ours.
- [04:28]
B
Yelling at me.
- [04:29]
A
Yeah, he's yelling at me.
- [04:31]
B
It's in Samuel L. Jackson's voice. So that, that has been kind of.
- [04:35]
A
Turned it into a humor with his vocabulary.
- [04:38]
B
Sometimes, yes.
- [04:43]
A
It'S a good thing we can't all listen in. So I, I think that's a, I think that's a great point, Fred. And I'd like to hear both those, both those TED talks and, and probably not together.
- [04:54]
C
Right.
- [04:54]
A
Sharpen your saw and don't listen to the voice in your head. So a little, little worrisome there. Let's dive in. I mentioned the two organizations that you guys represent. So maybe just describe briefly, Fred, who are the AABP members? Where do they come from? How many are there? And then, Bob, I'm going to ask you the same thing on ABC.
- [05:12]
C
You betcha.
- [05:13]
B
So, AABP, we are in our 60th year as a veterinary association, and we are an international group primarily based in the US and Canada. And we are over 4,000 members of veterinarians, veterinary technicians and veterinary students. And our primary mission is continuing education, but we also give out grants through our foundation, as well as support advocacy efforts for cattle veterinarians and also for producers.
- [05:43]
A
Excellent, Bob.
- [05:44]
C
Yeah. So the Academy of Veterinary Consultants, the ABC is a little bit smaller organization. We have about eight or 900 members, including some student members. It's almost as old as the AABP, but not quite. We just celebrated our 50th year a couple years ago, and this organization actually started very small with a group kind of as the feedlot industry was in its infancy and beginning. The other part of that that grew along with it was veterinarians that were consulting with the feedlot industry. And so it was a pretty small group of people that started getting together saying this is a specific, unique aspect of veterinary medicine, consulting for feedlots, trying to learn basically how to kind of learn on the go how to manage these operations and provide good animal health advice. And then it's grown from that. And so now, although we do try to maintain our focus on feedlot medicine, a lot of our members and a lot of our topics also deal with stocker cattle and cow calf production as well. So. And you know, both ABC and the aabp, we try to partner as much as we can. You know, food animal, veterinary medicine is a pretty small group of veterinarians compared to all veterinarians. And so it's really important that our two organizations work together real well. And, and we have, and that's been a pleasure working with Fred. And most of our members at the ABC are also members of the aabp because there's some real synergy between the two organizations?
- [07:06]
A
Yeah. So there's other veterinary organizations, but these two are the two that address cattle, beef and dairy cattle, all stages of life, different practices, procedures. One of the questions I had for you guys on the, you both mentioned students, do you see the same? Because in professional organizations there's been questions about if we have an aging population of veterinarians, do we see new members coming in? Do you see a slowdown? Do you see people coming out, getting out of school and being just as involved as they once were? Or what do you see?
- [07:42]
C
Well, my experience with ABC may be a little bit different than AAPVPS, but to be honest, the organization in its beginning wasn't really focused on students. It was, it was focused on the task of training veterinarians to work with feedlots. But over time, as our members, you know, the problems that we wanted to address changed and evolved. New veterinarians entering and succeeding in veterinary practice became really important. So over the last, you know, couple of decades, there's been an increasing emphasis on getting students to the meetings, getting young veterinarians involved in the organization, and really having links between generations of veterinarians. There is great value in older, mid career and new career veterinarians interacting with each other. There's a lot of shared knowledge and different perspectives that add some strength. So one of the goals is really to get young veterinarians, including students, in contact with older veterinarians. And it's a two way street as far as the information. How do we adapt new technology, how do we use things we've learned in the past? All of those things are increasingly important. So what I see is an increasing emphasis on young veterinarians in our organization. And I know the same is true for aabp, but they've probably been working at it even longer than we have.
- [08:58]
A
Fred, what do you see?
- [09:00]
B
You know, certainly engaging that next generation of bovine veterinarian is incredibly important to, you know, the entire profession. And I think one of the things, you know, just echoing on what Bob said is that getting those students to come to the meetings and participate is important because what we really want to do is show them what bovine practice is about. If you look at the student body population in general in the US and Canada, very few come from a rural background and very few, you know, express an interest in rural bovine or mixed animal practice. And so I think it's imperative for us as organizations, the ABC and the aabp, to show them this is what rural bovine practice is. You know, and that includes the Good, the bad and the ugly. Right. And we want to prepare them and show them that this is a great career. We certainly have challenges, but it's a great career option. And I think that's an opportunity that both of our organizations have focused on.
- [10:00]
A
There's real value in coming together, and both professional organizations are focused on continuing education. But it's also nice having a unified voice. There are some challenges where there are policies that need to be created, and you've got a group of people thinking about that rather than a single person. It's an entity. So as you guys go through the process through ce, there's multiple meetings, webinars, things that you get to see, and you're privileged because you get a view over everything and you get to see it at the time it happens and as it goes forward. And I want to kind of pick your brain on. We've got some topics that you see frequently over and over, and maybe there's not a lot of new information, but what has kind of got you excited or what have you seen recently that you're like, I really need to learn more about this? Or this was a great talk and discussion and something that we probably should talk more about. And Fred, I'll turn to you first.
- [10:53]
B
Well, I think one that's probably an old topic that we had at our conference this year was managing parasites in beef cattle.
- [11:00]
A
And.
- [11:01]
B
And Adriano Avata from LSU Louisiana State University gave that talk at aabp. I'm actually going to do a podcast with him which will be available to anyone, including producers. But I think my main take home from that talk was, number one, there is resistance to, you know, parasite treatments that we have available. Now, parasites remain important, although we've been certainly treating parasites for, you know, forever, they remain an important problem in beef cattle, on cow calf ranches. And then lastly, the importance of involving the veterinarian in that many of these products are over the counter and just going through and deworming everything because it's a certain day and those cattle are in the chute versus having a total parasite control program is important for producers to use their veterinarian, and that's just to prevent resistance, because once you have that on your pastures, that's going to continue to get worse. It's not something that we want to ignore. So the importance of that veterinarian in those conversations, I think is important for cow calf producers to understand.
- [12:11]
A
Well, and I think how we understand resistance, whether we're talking about resistance to parasiticides or resistance to antimicrobials is important, and I want to dive into that a little bit because a lot of our resistance, we have resistant parasites or resistant bacteria to antibiotics. But what we do when we treat is we select and change the population. So if we had 99 that were susceptible and one resistant, if we treat, then you may end up with that one resistant, but one then becomes 100% of the population. Right. Is that the concept, Bob?
- [12:51]
C
Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, it's one of the things that it also just. It's a human concern or a human maybe mindset of when I want to treat something, I want to kill them all. So whether we're talking bacteria or, you know, sanitizing our counters at home or anything like that, and, you know, we live in a world where we honestly, we humans and the animals around us and the plants around us actually interact with bacteria and viruses all the time. We need to see it as we're trying to avoid imbalances, but we're not trying to wipe them out. And that is a real mindset change. So when I think about parasites, my job isn't to wipe them out. When I think about bacteria, my job isn't to wipe them out. My job is to make sure that the balance doesn't get out of balance.
- [13:36]
A
Which is counterintuitive because when I have more problems and I want to treat more and the more I treat and Fred, this is kind of what you were saying came up in that talk, is that just blindly treating over and over again, I'm actually just putting more selection pressure.
- [13:53]
B
Yeah. It's something that veterinarians have to talk to producers about, is that some animals that go through that chute, you want to let them out and leave the worms in them. That refugia, they call that to, you know, mitigate that resistance, allow those parasites to be there in a low level. And that's something that you can work with your veterinarian on, I think, to incorporate that into your parasite control programs.
- [14:20]
A
Yeah, and we've been doing it on small ruminants for a while. We haven't seen it as much applied in cattle. But essentially, to my analogy earlier, if you had 100 with 99 of them susceptible and 1 resistant, if you leave that 1 resistant, that's 100% of the population. However, if I leave 10 others, all of a sudden I've still got 9 susceptible, and 1 resistant in that population changes the balance. And when it repopulates, which it will, then I've got still 90% resistant. Is that the am I getting the concept correct?
- [14:53]
C
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And we have learned this from other species. So sheep and goats, partly because of their grazing patterns, partly because of the way we manage them, have had a bigger problem. So we should pay attention and learn and not make some of the same mistakes. But that's exactly right is our goal is not to wipe out all parasites. Our goal is to identify the animals that are most at risk, which tend to be young animals, sometimes pregnant or lactating animals, and good healthy adults. They can live with a little bit of a parasite load and probably should.
- [15:23]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's an important concept and that's one of the good reasons to have some of these scientific meetings and things that occur. And I want to shift a little bit. And Fred, you're one of your other jobs is you serve as the editor for Bovine Practitioner, which is a journal that comes out and there was an article here that, that came out recently that I think addresses a question that we got relative to anaplasmosis. So when you ask about preventing anaplasmosis, a lot of times we do something like chlortetracycline or an antibiotic in the mineral or we try to do something else. Fred, what was that? Recent research out of Mississippi State.
- [16:07]
B
Yeah, thanks, Brad. So I'll start with the Bovine Practitioner is an open access peer review journal. And we have thousands of articles that are available and searchable and we have an editorial team and Brad is one of our associate editors right now. And it's the only peer reviewed publication devoted entirely to bovine medicine, health and production. And so we have a lot of really practical articles in there for practicing veterinarians and certainly producers have access to those as well. This particular paper with Dr. Isaac Jumper, they looked at consumption patterns of free choice mineral packs that have chlortetracycline in it. And so essentially what they did was they measured consumption and then they looked at the levels of chlor tetracycline that were being consumed. And the take home message from that is, number one, it's, it's pretty variable as far as individual animal consumption rates. And number two, there is a significant proportion of cattle when they're on a free choice program that has an antibiotic in it like chlortetracycline, they are consuming less than the therapeutic dose, which is a little bit concerning because we also know that those products are labeled for control of anaplasmosis, but not labeled to be included in a free choice Mineral program, which we're all aware is how they're actually fed. They're labeled to be, you know, hand fed individual animal, which is not practical in most of our ranches today in the U.S. so I just thought that was an interesting paper. It. We really don't have solutions, but the question of that was what are these cattle actually eating? And I think that this paper did answer that, at least in that one subset of cattle.
- [17:54]
A
Yeah. And as a, as a clarifying comment, I said earlier, we put CTC in the mineral. We used to put CTC in the mineral. You have to follow there's a veterinary feed directive. You have to follow that labeling. And as you correctly stated, Fred, it's supposed to be hand fed so that you can control the quantity. And I think many of us have assumed mineral consumption on the individual cow basis is variable. Isaac's paper did a great job of describing exactly how variable that is and that you can't count on that to get your level of antibiotics that's going to help control this disease. And it's, and it's labeled for control, not necessarily for prevention. You're not going to prevent infection because. Remind us, Bob, how does anaplasmosis transmit?
- [18:36]
C
Yeah, so anaplasmosis is one of those diseases. It's quite frustrating because it is transmitted by ticks. Primarily. Anything that moves blood from one animal to another can. But ticks fill an important role in that. Actually, the organism can multiply inside ticks. And so not only is it just physically moving blood from one animal to another, it actually injects a bigger dose than what it took in. And everybody knows tick control is notoriously difficult. Those little organisms are tough to kill. And so what you're left with is you try to manage tick population the best you can. Some of our insecticides work, but only usually for a short period of time. Things like burning pastures and burning areas where ticks congregate help a little, but they've just not given us the tools to really drive the population of ticks down in a pasture where we know we have problems. And so we're kind of stuck with, I've got a disease that's carried by ticks and I can't destroy that tick population. And so the disease is more common in parts of the country where the ticks that carry it are more common. So think southeast. But when it moves into an area where the disease has not been previously, those cattle are completely naive to it and you see some big problems. In fact, I'll use Kansas as an example, for many, many years, the southeast portion of the state, really the eastern portion of the state, anaplasmosis has been present long enough that a lot of the cattle have some immunity. And we don't see the big health problems. You certainly see an occasional animal gets pretty sick, but you don't see the big health problems. Well, a few years ago, the disease kind of moved into more of the central and a little bit farther west into the state. And those herds were really susceptible. And we saw some pretty bad disease outbreaks. We saw animals, animal deaths, we saw some abortions, and we saw some things. And that is the frustrating thing about this disease is we almost, because our tools are limited, you almost have to kind of wait for the animals to catch up with the disease pressure and kind of build some immunity and build some resilience. And we don't see those same problems in those same geographic areas anymore. We're kind of like the other part of the state where, where, yes, we still continue to continue to see some small problems, but we don't see the devastating outbreaks we did a few years ago.
- [20:53]
A
And I think it's important to think about how that disease works. So it's going to. It's going to infect the red blood cells which subsequently get destroyed. And the importance of that is the animals will have anemia. And when you have anemia, you're fine unless you have to exercise or unless you have to do something active in. Until it gets to a certain point, at which point you crash and go down. So a couple cautions for producers. One, if you think it's anaplasmosis, you're going to need to get your veterinarian involved so we can treat them. The sooner we identify them, the more effective the treatment is. And the treatment, I will say, is not curative. It's not going to get rid of the anaplasmosis. It may take care of some of the clinical signs, but that animal is going to have to rebuild itself, its blood cells. The other caution I would give is the. Those animals can sometimes be aggressive. They can, because they're not getting enough oxygen to their brain. And when you don't get enough oxygen to your brain, you may think the cows are not using it that much, but they're using it for some.
- [21:55]
C
Yeah, you do have to be aware that. So from your own safety standpoint, those cattle can be aggressive. And as you said, they're very low on red blood cells. They are very anemic. And so if I identify some animals that are affected. I don't necessarily want to walk them a mile to a squeeze chute. I really have to be cognizant of the fact that exercise is not a good thing at this point. And so again, get your veterinarian involved and come up with some strategies to try to save those animals through effective treatment, understanding that there's some real constraints.
- [22:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've appreciated you joining us today, Fred. And if you want to hear more from Fred, he's got his own podcast through the aabp, have you heard? And he's as he mentioned, the Bovine Practitioner is a great journal that describes some of these topics that we've discussed in a lot more detail. So thanks for joining us today, Fred. Thank you.
- [22:50]
B
Always appreciate the opportunity.
- [22:52]
A
Yep, absolutely. And if you have questions, comments, things you'd like us to talk about, you can send us an email@bcisu.edu.