Courier New;Cambria Math;  This session we're going to lead off with my colleague Zen Miller from Outagamie County.  Zen has been the dairy and livestock agent there now for 20 years and Zen is going to share with us a research project that he's been involved with and he's going to lead off talking about dehorning and the work that they've done over the last couple of years regarding dehorning and then he's going to have his intern also share some information with us so Zen, all yours.  - Hey, thank you.  So I'm gonna kick us off today and we have all our equipment that we use laid out here and usually I'm kind of all over, but we'll start with this first demonstration today.  I have two skulls here, hopefully you can see them.  Some of you have seen these before.  These are European mounts.  My taxidermist had never done this before but the bugs worked great.  So you can see that this head, this calf got euthanized and this actually we're guessing, I got these at Kroll's, so this calf I'm guessing is less than a week old, maybe only a couple days old. 

 And this calf, I have a veterinarian here, he probably could tell me how to do this, but I'm guessing two to four months old, maybe a little bit longer, and blunt trauma is what they use to euthanize this calf.  So now my next question is, well, what's the difference besides size? And in the back, I don't know if you can see this or not, but this one has horn buds, and they're ossified and they're connected to the skull, and this one doesn't.  And so it's pretty visual, you can see that, and my guess is and I'm not a veterinarian.  I have a son that is, so maybe we can ask Gordie when he gets up here, but it's a little more intrusive when you're taking those horn buds off when they're already ossified to the skull and attached.  And they attach between 30 and 60 days, so last summer I had the opportunity to have a summer intern, I got the smartest and the best and the most driven person I could, Bethany Marks, and we picked of several things that she did, we picked dehorning, and one of the reasons why and most of you are in the National Dairy Farm program, and if you say no, then I need to ask you where you ship because about 90 percent of the milk gets shipped into processors that use this program.  On page eight, you get asked this question.  Calves are disbudded at eight weeks of age or earlier with appropriate use of analgesic or anesthetics, yes or no? And then it says don't know, so that's possible.  All other planned medical procedures are performed at the earliest age possible with appropriate use of medication.  So this is becoming an issue, you have a few more years before they say this, but now they've implemented a plan of continual improvement, which means that if you say no to this, they want to know some type of plan of how you'll get to do this.  And then finally to introduce our topic, and I don't know if any of you get this magazine, Progressive Dairymen, but there's an article in here, and my survey work hasn't been this good but they say that 55 percent of the dairies report using pain relief at dehorning and my work hasn't been that way yet so I don't know if I'm not talking to the right people or if we're just not the same people they're talking to. 

 So we want to talk a little bit about disbudding or dehorning, Bethany's going to come up and I'll tell you a little bit about Bethany.  Every time I meet her, she's gotten a new award, and now she's won some holstein award for outstanding young holstein youth, I guess.  Bethany is a very brilliant student.  She has very good grades and she's taking a class online in between semesters.  She was one of four people accepted in the school of veterinary medicine at Madison on the early in program, so she just has to maintain her grade point average and take the right courses and get the right grades and she's going to be a vet, so someday she may be on your farm.  So we devised a plan that would say, Bethany, you're very smart, now let's learn some of these veterinarian skills because dad wasn't letting her do this before she worked at the Extension office, and then getting her on farms and this is an old Iowa term, so she could learn how to roll the cob, talk cows a little bit and talk about farming a little bit you know.  So Bethany's going to give the presentation and when she's done, if there's anything else I'll add to it but I'm sure she won't miss anything.  I'm kind of her prop person now, so Bethany, come on up.   - So as Zen said, I was the summer intern last summer for Onagamie County Extension and we did a dehorning project, so what we did is we went to farms, we visited 46 farms over the summer, and dehorning was performed at 22 of those farms.  At the other farms, they maybe just had dehorning protocols already set so that we didn't need to do any demonstrations there. 

 We trained a total of 50 people over the summer, and dehorned a total of 179 calves.  This is the breakdown of how we dehorned calves on the farm, 39 calves were dehorned with Dr. Naylor's paste, and I'll talk about that a little later.  41 of those calves were dehorned with Dr., excuse me, the first one was Dr. Larson's, and the second one was Dr. Naylor's.  16 calves were burned with the dehorner with no pain medication.  31 we used lidocaine to dehorn those calves.  Four calves were dehorned with just meloxicam and 48 calves were dehorned with meloxicam and lidocaine.   So a little bit about how we did these demonstrations on the farm.  First with the caustic paste, there's two types of paste.  We have Dr. Naylor's paste, and Dr. Larson's.  Each look about the same, they look like paste. 

  And you take about a quarter size amount of this paste and put it right on the horn bud but before you do that, you want to take a clippers and clip the hairs so that the paste will work more effectively on that horn bud and when you do this, this wants to be done within 24 hours of birth to four days.  You don't want to wait longer than that because then calves will learn to rub it off or kick it off with their foot and then that won't be as effective as if done earlier.   Then we also did hot iron dehorning with a butane burner that looks just like this.   On some farms we used the pain management to dehorn calves, we would give lidocaine just like this, we'd give five CCs on each side.  Right, it's kind of on the calf's skulls.  You would put it right in this lirrlw area here.  If you feel there's a great indent that you'd be able to see, and you put the five CCs of lidocaine right in there.  Then we also gave meloxicam to some calves.  That helps with pain later on after the lidocaine may wear off and we gave three meloxicam tablets per 100 weight, so a newborn or a four-week-old calf maybe would use three or four pills.   To burn the horns off we gave the pain management. 

 We clipped the hairs well and then burned them with the burner.  We would also talk about polled genetics when we were on the farm.  We would ask the farmer if he's used polled bulls or if not, if you were to use a homozygous bull, your calves would be 100 percent polled which would mean they would have no horns and if you used the heterozygous bull, then 50 percent of the calves would be polled, meaning you'd have a 50/50 chance that your calves would be polled or horned.  The list of polled placings that you guys have we handed out to 39 farmers so they have that at their use for using those bulls.  And come to find out that there are some farmers that already use polled genetics prior to our visit so that's something good to hear.   So then after we did these visits, we sent out a survey to all these farms to see if they had changed any of their dehorning protocols or things of that nature.  So what we were looking for in the survey was understanding of a few of the concepts that we talked about while on their farm.  If they use pain management, we wanted to find out if they used that before our visit and if they changed anything and used it after our visit as well as if their methods of dehorning has changed and if they incorporated polled genetics after our visit and as of yesterday, we have received 14 surveys back and 12 of those surveys that we've received have dehorning performed on their farm.  So a little of the results we have, in our survey we had a table real similar to this in it and asking farmers of their understanding of these concepts.  Before the visit, the farmers' understanding of the benefits of pain medication on minimizing stress responses when dehorning calves or disbudding calves. 

 We added values to each of the very high, high, low, and very low, and so that value came out to 1.88, and then after our visit the value increased variably to 3.5.   So the farmers learned that if giving pain management would help the calf out greatly.  Then we also asked the importance of disbudding calves at three days of age, or before three days of age, and that went from 2.11 to 3.86, so that also increased greatly.  And then we also asked about the availability of polled dairy genetics, and that also increased from 2.25 to 3.13, so we learned that the farmers did learn things from when we visited their farms, so that's a good thing to hear.   Other things that we got from the survey were changes on the farms, so of the 14 farms that we received surveys back, three farms went from burning to paste, so instead of burning the horns they changed to the caustic paste.  Three farms increased their use of paste which maybe before our visit they only pasted half their calves but now they're pasting all of their calves after birth.  Three farms continued burning but burned at earlier ages so that it's less invasive on the calf, and five farms did not change their methods, but two of those farms were already using paste.  Two farms increased their use of lidocaine and meloxicam, which made it easier on the calves and one farm increased their use of polled genetics so that they won't have to dehorn those calves.   We also had a spot for comments that we would like to hear from the farmers.  Farmers said that calves don't fight as much when given lidocaine, so that's less stress on them trying to handle the calf. 

 Also, the paste is a lot easier than I thought, so some farmers didn't know how to use the paste, when to use it, how to apply it, and things of that nature, so they found that it was a lot easier to use and to apply to the calf.   Some farmers said that they would burn the horns when they are smaller so that it is less invasive on the calf and a little easier for them to recover from and that with polled genetics that polled bulls don't have the type of numbers or the type of traits they're looking for for breeding so that's something that's still developing with polled genetics and the recommendations that we gave while on the farm is to dehorn calves at an earlier age when burning the horns.   Work with your veterinarian to make dehorning protocol.   Use pain management on older calves so it's less invasive on them and less stress for them, and introduce polled genetics into your herd.  You don't have to breed all the cows but you could breed some of your bottom 10 percent to polled bulls so that maybe you wouldn't have to dehorn those calves right when they're born.  And so that's kind of what we did this summer.  I guess we'll hold questions until the end, so I'll give it back to Zen.  - Thanks, thank you Bethany.  She did a really great job and I saw a lot growth in Bethany this summer.  First, her whole family's a little quiet, must be genetic, I must've missed that gene when I was born, I'm not sure, but... 

 She just got so, I could say, well go to this farm and she'd come back and I know that she just stood there toe to toe with some big grizzly farmer that said oh, you guys are crazy in the Extension office but she stuck to her time so let's give her a round of applause and then we'll take questions.  (audience applauds)