By Adrian A Barragan
As the beef cattle calving season quickly approaches for most ranchers, this is an ideal time to revisit calving monitoring and assistance guidelines. Whenever I discuss calving in beef herds, I remember my early years as a veterinarian working on ranches, when this season was always one of the busiest and most demanding from a veterinary standpoint. This is often true for producers as well, since more attention has to be placed on the pregnant cows that will transition from a gestational no-lactation stage to a no-gestational lactation one. And on top of this, there will be newborn calves on the ground that producers have to keep an eye on. As I am primarily a dairy veterinarian these days, I often compare health management in the two industries and attempt to translate practices from one to the other that may be beneficial. In beef cattle, once nutritional needs are properly addressed, the risk of disease is lower compared to dairy cattle. However, during the periparturient period, the most common health issue for both is dystocia.
Dystocia, by definition, is a prolonged calving resulting in the need for personnel assistance in order to deliver the calf. There are several causes of dystocia, being the most common ones fetal malpresentation and fetal-maternal mismatch. Although when it comes to managing dystocia, the focus should be on prevention, this article will cover how to identify and manage dystocia. A key component of providing proper assistance to a cow experiencing dystocia is timing. Assisting a cow too early or too late can have a negative impact on both the dam and the newborn calf. For instance, if a cow is assisted too early before it is fully dilated, the friable soft tissue of the birth canal can be damaged, resulting in tears, or even worse, the rupture of vessels, which in severe cases can lead to death due to internal hemorrhage. Vaginal and vulvar tears greater than 2 cm have been associated with an increased risk of developing clinical metritis in dairy cattle. On the other hand, assisting a parturient cow too late can compromise the survivability of the calf, leading to weak calves, which subsequently result in low colostrum and IgG intakes, or in severe cases, stillborn calves.
When it comes to calving monitoring in beef cattle operations, the frequency is often lower than in dairy farms, where people are around calving pens most of the day. Furthermore, the common grazing non-confined system in beef cattle operations makes it more difficult (e.g., hard-to-access pens) and time-consuming to monitor cows regularly. A common strategy to monitor prepartum cows is to walk the calving pens twice or three times a day (every 8 or 12 hours). However, in this scenario, personnel may miss the window to provide timing assistance, thereby decreasing the odds of positive outcomes when assisting a dystocic cow and its calf.
While in dairy farms, it is recommended to check prepartum cow pens every hour, my advice for beef operations is to try to check the pens at least every 3 hours. The reason for this regular monitoring is to try to identify cows at the beginning of stage two or labor. Now, you may ask, why do I want to know when a cow starts labor? The short answer is to know if, and when, you may need to assist that cow. The time the cow spends in labor and the frequency of progress are the primary factors used to determine when a cow is experiencing dystocia, and they serve as landmarks to assist cows in a timely manner.
Source : psu.edu