Cold therapy and pain relief after hot-iron disbudding in dairy calves

Even when pain control is implemented, calves may experience pain for days after hot-iron disbudding. Whether calves seek pain relief post-disbudding offers a novel approach to assessing pain in these animals. By employing an approach-aversion paradigm, we explored the ability of cold therapy to pro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2024-07, Vol.19 (7), p.e0306889
Main Authors: Colston, Kane P J, Ede, Thomas, Mendl, Michael T, Lecorps, Benjamin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analgesia
Analgesics
Anesthesia
Animals
Aversion
Brittleness
Calves
Care and treatment
Cattle
Cold
Cold Temperature
Cryotherapy - methods
Cryotherapy - veterinary
Dairying
Female
Forehead
Horns - surgery
Iron
Meloxicam
Milk
Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs
Pain
Pain Management - methods
Pain perception
Physiology
Place preference conditioning
Temperature
Therapy
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Summary:Even when pain control is implemented, calves may experience pain for days after hot-iron disbudding. Whether calves seek pain relief post-disbudding offers a novel approach to assessing pain in these animals. By employing an approach-aversion paradigm, we explored the ability of cold therapy to provide immediate pain relief in disbudded calves. Calves were habituated to the manual placement of a cool or ambient pack on their forehead for a short duration simultaneous to milk reward consumption, prior to disbudding. Calves were then disbudded under local anaesthesia (procaine) and analgesia (meloxicam), and responses to the packs were observed over subsequent days. Individual calves were consistently exposed to either cool or ambient packs in different halves of a two-sided experimental pen, allowing for the testing of approach-aversion and conditioned place preference. We found calves approached milk rewards quicker and maintained contact for longer when receiving cold therapy compared to the ambient control. However, calves did not display any conditioned preference for the pen where they received the cool pack. These results add to the growing evidence of lasting pain following disbudding procedures and suggests that cold therapy provides some form of pain relief post-disbudding. Future studies should seek other ways to use cold therapy post-disbudding to reduce aversiveness and human involvement.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0306889