NIAA brings lameness experts together
The National Institute for Animal Agriculture is known for bringing people together to have the tough conversations around animal health and wellbeing. That was the case in late January when the NIAA brought together experts for a roundtable discussion about all things pertaining to lameness across various livestock species.
Did you know the incidence of lameness in production livestock has not decreased in the last two decades? Despite knowing more about preventing and treating the condition than ever before, it’s still occurring just as much as it was at the turn of the century. This is more than a Sunday morning conundrum to solve, it’s a major issue for animal welfare on every level. All of this information was brought to the attention of the National Institute for Animal Agriculture (NIAA) and their response was to bring experts together to hash out the issue.
“As we went through the planning process, one of our goals was to bring these experts together to better understand the commonalities between species when it comes to lameness issues,” said Kaitlyn Briggs who is a member of the NIAA board, a veterinarian and dairy welfare lead for fairlife dairy. “Our main goal was to talk away answering the question: where do we want to go next to move this forward?” Held in conjunction with the International Production & Processing Expo in Atlanta, Georgia, January 27 and 28, this first roundtable attracted about 30 participants. “It was a smaller group, but there were enough people to have really great conversations,” Briggs said. “We decided this should be a yearling meeting and hope to rotate between different species conferences.”
Takeaways
Day one kicked off with updates from experts about the main causes and concerns for lameness in their species of interest. This included information about how producers for that species think about and subsequently treat their lameness problems. “One takeaway that I’m especially proud of is that we identified overlap between the different species that I don’t think most people in attendance knew existed,” Briggs said. “It revealed that there’s an opportunity to work together; places where interdisciplinary and even across species research could be beneficial for a large group.”
Most lameness issues are a direct result of management decisions made on a daily basis. Usually, those decisions are made in a single moment, and their impact won’t be felt for a significant amount of time. “Our production systems drive us to make decisions in the moment and an interesting point that kept coming up is that it all comes down to stress and the weakened immune system that results from that,” Briggs said. “That allows bacteria to set in and ultimately results in a lame animal.” Low stress handling practices are top of mind during any animal welfare conversation, but what about the factors that can’t be controlled? Both heat and cold stress were brought up as major contributors to potential causes of lameness. “We can definitely mitigate stress from hot and cold weather, but we can never fully stop that type of stress,” Briggs added. “The question was asked; how can we better prepare the immune system for different types of stress? We talked about vaccines for the bacteria that causes lameness. And, specifically in cattle, how can we feed them to prevent acidosis and potentially see a link between that and a decrease in lameness.”
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for the lameness issue. In fact, attendees agreed that it should be an ongoing pursuit, and this roundtable was a great way to get the ball rolling. “I left feeling optimistic that this group and their network could start to make bigger strides in this area,” Briggs said. “That was especially evident in the way people were thinking creatively about technology and management in the prevention of lameness going forward.” Any doctor will agree, prevention is always preferrable to treatment. If you can prevent a problem from happening in the first place, everyone will benefit in the long run. Right now, identifying early stages of lameness is a limiting factor in both prevention and early intervention. That comes down to employee training and some of the management techniques used to find lame animals in the first place.
“The way to find out if broiler chickens are lame is by taking a broom and walking through the pen; as the birds move away from the broom you have to watch how they’re walking,” Briggs said. Anyone who’s taken a lame horse to the vet has been through a similar experience. A set of trained, inherently biased eyes watches the animal moves and decides in that amount about the animal’s pain level and root cause of lameness. It’s not even close to a perfect system and it leaves a lot of room for error. “Lameness is a welfare indicator that anyone can spot when a four-legged animal is only using three legs,” Briggs said. “But what about before that? How can we help producers identify lameness early? Finding a way to use unbiased technology to find the lameness for us is an avenue a group in the dairy industry is currently looking into.”
Sometimes raising production animals becomes such a science that it’s almost easy to forget that lame animals are in fact in pain. Not only does a lame animal impact the bottom line, but it can also be a health indicator for the entire herd. “Something we heard a lot is that people can go to these discussions but then feel like they’re having the same conversations year after year,” Briggs said. “We’re not trying to do that here. We’re looking for change and one thing that came up in the discussions is the desire to focus on continuous improvement.” Now that the roundtable has concluded, the planning committee has created a few new goals for themselves. The first is to write a white paper detailing the information discussed at the event. They’re hopeful that it will be completed and divulged to interested parties by early summer. As they look forward to next year, the NIAA wants to figure out how to bring groups together and create something fruitful from those meetings.
For more information about the NIAA, visit http://www.animalagriculture.org.
