Abstract

Cautery disbudding is a painful procedure commonly performed on-farm to destroy the horn bud cells of goat kids to prevent horn growth. Disbudding is performed because horns can injure pen mates and stock people. Globally, standard practice of disbudding typically excludes the use of pain-mitigation and there are few studies investigating kid responses to disbudding and different pain-mitigation strategies. To date, pain-mitigation strategies used when disbudding kids include administration of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), local anaesthesia (LA) and general anaesthesia (GA). Meloxicam (NSAID) reduced pain-related responses in cautery-disbudded kids (Ingvast-Larsson et al. 2011). Local anaesthetics (e.g., lignocaine), however, have not shown to be affective at reducing the pain response following disbudding (Alvarez et al. 2015). General anaesthesia has been used in kids, but its effect on pain-related responses was not assessed (Ingvast-Larsson et al. 2011). The objective of this study was to evaluate the physiological response to different painmitigation strategies for cautery-disbudding in goat kids.

MN, Hempstead, M Stewart, and MA Sutherland

Proceedings of the New Zealand Society of Animal Production, Volume 76, Adelaide, 106-108, 2016