Jim Lowe again, we want to talk a little bit now about how do we actually handle livestock within these intensive livestock production of systems and the facilities we need to do that. So, we're standing today in really a very nice beef processing barn. This is what we're going to describe to you, it's called the tub and snake approach. But it is how we would handle the calves or even up to mature cows to do veterinary procedures on them to allow us to do the health interventions in a safe low-stress way. There's another system that can be used called a bud box, and we'll talk about that in a different session. But for now we want to really focus on how does this tub and snake work and how do we handle livestock in a way that minimizes the amount of stress. So, I'm standing here in an alley way that's wide enough for several cows. The cows are going to come in this alleyway. We close the cross gate here and chain it up here so that the cows would come in and then the cows are going to move into these tubs. So, our goal is to move a low number of cows at a time. So, we want to move five to six cows at a time based on the size of this tub and no more than that. We're going to stand here at the corner and we're going to ask the cows to walk past us, ask them to walk in around this way, around the corridors so that they can go into the tub and see where they're going. The principle is really a moving livestock or to focus on the eyeball so that they can see you because they are a prey species and they view us as a predator. So, I want them to be able to see where I'm at. I want to recognize what they're doing. So, as I step towards them and get in on their flight zone and they have that flight or flight response, they'll start to move a body part, maybe just twitching their ear or maybe they take a step back. I need to accept that and step back, and when they release the pressure so I'm going to pressure them and release. I want to do that in a manner so that I can move them. So, I want to walk right at the edge of their flight zone. So, I'm going to bring the cows along. I want the cow to see me like you are the cow there. I want to walk where she's at, and if I wanted to go this way, I'm going to step this way. So, I'm going to move across the globe of her eye and ask her to go around me so she can always see me. So, we're going to low stress bring these cattle in, walk them very smoothly into the tub and past us, and again in small numbers. There's a holding pen out behind this so we'll leave the majority of the cows out. We'll bring small numbers at a time into this area and ask them to go through the facilities. So, I'm going to use this pressure and release technique, where if I lean into them, apply some pressure and make it move faster, I get into their flight zone, and if I back up, I take pressure off of them and they slow down. So, I'm going to try to group these pigs up and get them to walk down the fence line for me. One at a time so I can look at them so I get a better chance of finding the sick pigs. Now, this is easier to do if you start when they're new babies. Because if we do that when they're new, then we get the right habits and traits. You can see these pigs are around me now really inquisitive of me, but not necessarily their flights are pretty short. So, this maybe a bit [inaudible] what we wanted, but the idea being how do I get pigs in a group and then get them to walk so I can look at them. Because I've got probably 400 pigs in this pen here, so how do I look at individuals in a manner that's actually somewhat effective? So, we're going to give this a [inaudible]. So, we think if we do this about position, where am I at in the pen? Just in cell far from I, which way I'm moving forward or backwards and what angle I'm approaching them at. I want to think about moving on a 45-degree angle to the column. I want to be far enough away that when I extend move then I can stop, I might be at the edge of their flight zone. If I want them to go forward, I pressure them a bit. I push into the flight zone, and if I want them to slow down I back out of that flight zone but I do that on a 45-degree angle. These pigs are about four weeks on feet so they had some interaction so we've not trained them very well. If I do this literally to lean forward by the fifth or sixth week, they know the drill and they'll group up for you and do what they need to do. So, as we progress through this, we're going to bring the cows into this area. There's a large gate here. We're going to put five or six cows, maybe only four as big as this tub is. We're going to put them in the tub and we're going to close this gate so that they can progress through the system. So, we've got our cows in the tub now, and this tub really functions in a round manner. It might not be ideal because cows like to see where they're at, but this is a very typical handling facility. So, as we bring the cows into this facility, the exit to go in the alley up to the handling shoot is right here. So, there's a big alley here that we're going to ask those cows to go down. So, as I bring the cows into the alley and they're in here, if I close this gate, we'll leave it open so you can see, I really want to either get myself in a position so that the cows can walk past me and go down the alley, or if I have to and I have to close this gate, then I want to be up on top so I can ask those cows to move forward. Now, this is the most common handling system in the United States: high solid-sided walls in a tub. We do that because it's a way to make it safer for people and cows. I would argue that that's probably not the best bet because we're not working within the cow's normal behavior. As we talked about before the cows are a prey species, she likes to see, she doesn't like to be threatened. If a cow's gone through this tub five or six times without any incident, it's not a problem. But if I'm a new cow and I don't know where I'm going, this is really dark. They can't really see what they're doing. They can't see out and they can't see me as a handler. So, my only alternative to move these cattle in a particularly low-stress way is to actually get in the pen with them, which isn't very safe for me. So, there's some things we could do that might make this more efficient. We can make these walls less solid so the cows could see out. We can make this panel less solid so they could see out, and most importantly because this is the hall, we're going to ask the cows to go down to starting at the alley, we can make this panel not solid so they could actually see the hall. If I'm a cow like where you're at, it's awfully difficult to know that's the place you want me to go. So, just literally by removing some steel, we can make this much more cow-friendly to be able to move through the facility. So, I've moved down the alleyway now where the cow would be and I'm standing on my tiptoes, so normally the cow can't see this high, and if I get it a normal cow height, you can't even really see me. The cow's going to walk down this alley and around the circle back to the processing tub which is really behind the camera right now. Again, these facilities are very common in the United States and are referred to as a tub and snake system, as you can see the alley snakes its way around the facility. They're actually quite good because they don't require a lot of space, but they do require a lot of steel. As we've talked about the cow can't see out of this, there's some belief that it's easier because all the cow will be inquisitive and want to go around the corner, but actually that's not what cows really like to do and only when they're heavily trained, do they move in these facilities well. They work much better if the sides are perforated, at least to one side so the cow can out, it can see where she's going, and more importantly, she can see me. You'll notice in front of me on the other side of this gate there's a catwalk for me to stand on, for the handler to stand on. Naturally designed for the handler to be on top of the cow and tap the cows back and keep them moving. Now, again from a low stress standpoint, I really don't want to touch the cow, I want to work off her eyeball and ask the cow to go forward for me by communicating with her, stepping at the edge of her flight zone, letting her recognize where I'm at and then moving in the opposite direction from which I wanted her to move. So, if I want her to go to the left, I go to the right. If I wanted to go to the right, I go to the left to allow her to release that pressure on herself, and then I move myself back at a 45-degree angle so she can continue to see me and will continue to walk. Once I create motion, things work very well so that she could continue to walk through the snake and up towards the processing chute. These types of facilities are common. They can be used but certainly probably not our first choice. The challenge is that they stop motion. Motion is our friend when we're doing low-stress cattle handling or really low-stress pig handling or sheep handling or anything else. We want the animals to start moving and keep moving. You'll notice that this alley is probably 20 cows long. If it takes me two or three minutes to process a cow, a cow could easily stand in this alley for 40 minutes before she gets moved up through the processing chute. I'd really like for the cow to only stand the alley three, four, five minutes ahead of processing. So, I just want one or two waiting in the queue to get in the chute, and I want this alley to continuously move. So, we've got a lot of facility here and it appears right again it's very common, but probably not the lowest stress handling model that we could have for cattle. So, we're at the end of the snake now and this is the processing chute. This is actually a big industrial strength hydraulic chute. So, let's talk about how this works. So, the cow is going to enter from in front of me this direction. Here in the beginning, let's take this bar down, you can see. The cow will at the gates head gate here will open and it's hydraulic lever it'll allow me to open the gate. Cow puts her head in there, we close the gate, now the cow is restrained. This is actually quite a piece of equipment as in both sides will move. The bottom will move in and out to accommodate appropriate cattle size so they can stand with all four feet on the ground. We can clamp them or restrict them in a squeeze fashion here. It's got a facility that open on the back to allow me to step in behind the cow. It's got a trap gate to catch him so that the cow doesn't back up as we're going to release that cow. This is a very nice shoot, we really like how it's designed, it's slight to the floor. The cattle don't have to step up and down. It's got good tread on the bottom with a no-slip floor. Again, all really good things for cattle handling. These bars as I dropped earlier we can put it back up, open up to allow us to reach in and give vaccines and appropriately in the neck, and this can be done with very low stress to the people. So, in summary, this is a quite expensive and very common way to handle cattle in the US. Maybe not all of it is necessary, maybe not all of it fits with our best cattle handling practices but certainly more than functional facility and with really properly trained people, they work very, very well and they're actually easy on people when we get to the end here with all the hydraulics to help make the system function. Okay, so we just wanted to talk a bit today about thermoregulatory behavior and what happens when it's cold. So, here we are in Central Illinois in the middle of March and it's a balmy zero centigrade today. So, not really probably what we think about. So yesterday it was 70 degrees Fahrenheit about 20 centigrade yesterday, really a nice day, sun shining, in overnight a front blows through and so it's a 30-mile or 20 mile an hour or 30-kilometer wind out of the north today. It's a little cold for some of us that have bald heads and so we wear hats. So, if we think about our critters out here every day, it's a bit tough as I put my hat back on here because my bald head can't handle it. For them to put a hat on because they don't wear hats and so what happens with animals in the cold? And so, Dr. Aldridge, do you just want to chat a bit about what happens today when critters get cold? When a front blows in this, we know I mean, as a practicing veterinarian, this is really hard on animals, we know we create a lot of sickness on days like today. So, what's going on inside of them? What's hard is three main areas really, I mean their energy demands increase massively in this kind of weather so these kind of temperatures we're talking about at least a 30 percent increase in energy demands over a normal temperature day, and then probably for every 10 degrees drop, with increasing another 20-30 percent in the energies demands. So, what you're saying is, for them to maintain growth or weight or just to maintain their body functions, they got eat 10,15, 20 percent more every day in terms of calories and protein just to get square. That's right. So, what we're looking around the dairy, we're looking for some of those areas of management which we can optimize when animals are in these kind of conditions and particularly when you get to wind chills and you're taking them to temperatures below freezing point. We've discussed that their nutrient requirements are increased by about 30 percent depending on the temperature, particularly when there's a wind, particularly when there's wet weather. So, we'll travel around the farm, we'll have a look at other areas, we'll look at some behaviors that might be related to changes in their metabolic needs associated with this lowering temperature and this cold weather, and we'll also see what kind of management things can we do to accommodate those changes as well. So, what were the sorts of signs that we look for? Certainly, an animal with an appetite, an excessive appetite where they're spending excessive time at their feed bunks. You can see with these animals here, we probably in this group we might have about 80 animals, and we probably see 25 percent of them are currently at the feed bunk. Now, they were fed probably about eight hours ago, and as you can see, they've eaten most of the food and yet they can't reach all of it. If you look carefully, they're working hard at trying to glean as much as they can. So, the producer in this situation has probably put out plenty of food but it also if you look carefully, they've taken the food that's accessible to them and what's left is a pile of food that's approximately a meter away from them that they're having trouble reaching as well. So, they're left to glean as much food as they can from the area that they can actually reach. I'd be interested to see how hungry these cows are, so what I'm going do is move this food up and see how many of them will come to get it. So, it's important not just to feed them the right amounts of food, but also to make sure that they have access to that food all the time. For cattle, they'll be eating at least eight hours a day and probably in some of these extreme temperatures it might even be eating for more than that. So, looking at for those signs of their appetite, even abnormal periods of the day, but making sure that access is available to them as well is very, very important. It's difficult for producers to adapt quickly to changing environments. So, when you get a cold storm or wet conditions, sometimes it overwhelms some of the pen drainage and so some of the animals will become wet and become dirty, and that increases their nutrient demands hugely because of the cold and the chill that that creates. So, they'll need to eat more to take care of the wet environment that they are suffering as well. So, here we have some calves, anything from one day to about eight weeks of age and at this stage they are almost wholly dependent on getting the nutrients from milk. So, for these animals, the cold weather today it's snowing it's around 34 degrees, their energy requirements will be somebody will says twice as much as normal. So, if they're on a fixed amount of milk, they are not going to be growing at the speed that you want them to grow. So, you need to increase their milk intake when these cold weather appears, and these pens provide a remarkable micro-environment and as does the straw that is there for their bedding. They can shelter from the wind within there, they're independently housed in individually housed because at this age, they're very susceptible to infectious disease. So, they can still socially interact, but in the cold weather, they can shelter from the wind, shelter from the rain and the snow, and with good straw bedding, they huddled down and they live almost in a nest and the temperature if you walk and sit in these little huts when a calf is in there, it's very warm indeed. So, the simple provision of housing and shelter such as this can actually offset some of the increased food demands that they need because they can create their own micro-environment. So, a simple pen design that can take into consideration weather extremes, but also a led expression of normal behavior and prevent some of the spread of individual diseases between individuals.
