4 Dec 2015
Roger Evans
Job Title
IMAGE: © Freeimages/Andrei Grigore.
The last time I wrote, I focused on the issue of antibiotic resistance in humans and how important it was farmers used antibiotics responsibly to keep antibiotic residues out of the food chain. The example I used was the blanket use of dry cow therapy across all cows in a herd.
Not only has this become a norm in the dairy farming industry, it has become a best practice norm, which is very dangerous. The point I made was it was incumbent on farmers to act responsibly on this and to endeavour to improve their husbandry to a sufficient degree that whole herd treatment was not necessary.
I wrote where dry cow treatment was to be used, it was to be targeted specifically at cows that needed it and, by testing their milk, it was known which antibiotic to use in each individual case.
It was, therefore, a sort of irony that no sooner had the ink gone dry on my A4 pad and my daughter had sent it down the tube to Veterinary Times, an article was in our daily newspaper on the same subject. But although about antibiotic resistance in humans, the cause was placed in a very different direction.
The blame was quite clearly pointed at GPs. We were told GPs had been dispensing antibiotics like Smarties, including blue Smarties. There’s me using terms like “incumbent responsibility” to avoid putting antibiotics in the food chain and according to the article I read, GPs have bypassed the food chain and are causing a lot of the problem themselves.
I know newspapers invariably sensationalise everything they can, and most things you read should be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt, but I actually find the story very believable.
I’ve been very lucky in life, health wise, but I have an issue now that has taken me to the doctor more times in the past 12 months than I’ve been in the previous 50 years, and that’s only three or four times. There was a time in my life, when I was playing rugby, where if I had an injury I would go to the vet to have it x-rayed and then I would take the x-ray to the doctor. It saved all that hanging about in accident and emergency.
But the few times I have been to the doctors, the waiting room is full of the same people every time. I listen to their own diagnoses of their own ills – invariably it’s for coughs and colds or viral infections they are all there to get some antibiotics for, and from what I know, antibiotics will do nothing to help.
The question is, do they get them? They probably do – if I was the doctor, I’d give them some to rid of them. In fact, I’d put some on the table and let them help themselves. The correct medical advice would probably be to tough it out for a few days. But it’s probably not what these people want to hear.
A doctor friend once told me he could predict up to around 90% of the patients who wanted to see him on a Monday morning. When you go into the waiting room, it does have a sort of club feel about it. In fact, once when I went, I was asked by another patient what I was doing there and what was wrong with me. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to ask me that. I told them I had one of those sexually transmitted diseases. As conversation stoppers go, that is probably as good as I have had. Antibiotic resistance is an important issue and all sectors of society need, apparently, to address it.
One of the troubles with dairy cows is you have to milk them. Milking in a timely and appropriate fashion can take over your life and usually does. One of the troubles for the cow is its stoic acceptance of pain. When something goes wrong, there is no way of knowing whether the animal is in pain or how much pain.
Cows could learn a lot from pigs – pigs tell you when they are in pain. Similarly, you don’t know how much pain, but if noise and volume is any measure, the pain is considerable. Many years ago I kept 100 sows. They went because of economics, but for years we continued to keep one. Keeping one sow was good and it was interesting. If you were at a low ebb, you could go and talk to a sow, and you always felt better for that talk.
There’s three generations of us on this farm and all of us occasionally say we’d like one sow again. But we haven’t got a spare place to keep one and lip service to the idea is as far as we go.
It’s quite easy to forget the downside to keeping a sow. One job I hated was putting a ring in a sow’s nose. I’ve got a feeling it’s illegal now, but putting that ring in a sow’s nose is probably the ultimate example of the link of pain to noise. I used to put a rope over the sow’s snout inside her mouth and, with a bit of luck, the rope would lodge on her teeth so she couldn’t back away.
Noise – there’s nothing to compare with it. People could hear it miles away. They used to get the children in out of the playground at the village school.
I often wonder about pain levels when we have a cow down. My son will spend days and days getting a down cow up, with a perseverance that does him credit. When you see a cow making an effort to get to its feet, getting halfway up, and failing, there’s no way of knowing if it failed because the pain is too severe or it’s something even more serious.
It’s quite easy to put yourself in the same position. If you hurt an ankle badly, you keep it off the floor until you can stand the pain. Pain may not be the whole of the problem with a down cow – there is no way (unlike a pig) of knowing. But it could be a part of the problem and I think as long as the cow is down, pain relief should be part of the treatment.
Most cows, after a difficult calving, are given a pain relief injection and I think they should continue to get those injections until the cow gets better. Pain is something we suffer occasionally, so we all know full well what it’s like. Just because some animals don’t demonstrate to us whether they are in pain doesn’t mean we should ignore the possibility they are and treat it just in case. Far better to err on the side of caution. Unless that animal is a pig.
