Photo Credit: Richard Seck
By Cate Willis
A University of Guelph study has found that improving housing environments for dairy cattle with hock injuries can promote healing.
Led by PhD student Amanda Armstrong and Dr. David Kelton, a professor in the Ontario Veterinary College, the team set out to better understand the relationship between hock and knee injuries and lameness in dairy cattle. They wanted to know what causes these injuries and how they can be resolved.
The hock is a prominent joint in the hind leg of a cow and anatomically is like a human ankle, explains Kelton. While there was a lot published about what causes hock and knee injuries and lameness, there wasn't a lot in the literature about how quickly those animals heal if the underlying problem is fixed, especially in terms of hock and knee injuries.
“We wanted to understand if we made some changes to the cows’ environment, how quickly these injuries would heal,” he says.
The team developed a long-term study to observe the movement and injury scores of the cows in 15 commercial herds that were making changes to cow housing environments. They looked at how the prevalence of hock and knee injuries changed over several months in the old and improved environments.
Kelton says that more severe hock and knee injuries can be caused by a fall against a hard surface, but the researchers noticed that more subtle injuries affecting cows can slowly develop into more significant issues, like lameness. Using their weekly observations of the cattle, they attributed these injuries to housing.
“When we house cows, they need to have a comfortable place to lie down that is durable enough to withstand the wear and tear of these cows moving around on them, getting up and down,” he says. “When the cow gets up or down and she rubs her hock or knee over course fabric for example, she essentially gets a carpet burn.”
Kelton says this kind of injury starts off with a bit of hair loss and then progresses to swelling. In some cases, there are also open sores. Only several weeks later did the ailment begin to affect cows’ mobility.
The team observed cows moved into new housing environments with different stall bases, including mattresses, sand, pasture or deep-bedded facilities.
Kelton says, on average, it took 40 to 70 days for the mild and moderate injuries to clear up. The best healing occurred in deep-bedded sand and pasture.
“One takeaway was that if we improve the environment for the cow, we should see a significant improvement in these milder injuries within a couple of months,” he says.
The team is currently putting together case studies on farms where cattle with lameness or abnormal movement have improved.
“We’re trying to understand what changes those farmers made and document the impact so that we can go back to the industry and show them what has worked.”
This research project was funded in part by Dairy Farmers of Ontario and the Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance, a collaboration between the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and the University of Guelph.