K-State Researchers Developing Index to Measure Cattle Pain, Stress Using Consumption Rate

By Joe Montgomery

How much can you tell about a cow’s health by the way and rate at which it eats? A team of researchers in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Kansas State University is developing a way to tie that rate to cattle health.

Hans Coetzee, currently the interim vice president of research at Kansas State University, is a well-established researcher in the fields of pain relief and animal welfare. He and Eduarda Bortoluzzi, assistant professor of animal welfare, are leading a project titled, “Validation of a novel Bovine Rate of Consumption Index (BROCI) to assess pain and thermal stress in cattle.”

The project was listed as one of 37 projects being funded from a $17.6 million total investment by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA, to advance agricultural research that protects the health and welfare of agricultural animals, with $4.8 million dedicated for 10 projects, including Coetzee’s, funded through Agriculture and Food Research Initiative’s “Welfare of Agricultural Animals” program.

“Protecting the health and welfare of agricultural animals is integral to ensuring a safe, sustainable, resilient and ethically sound food system,” said NIFA Director Manjit Misra. “Healthy livestock are more productive and less likely to harbor and spread diseases that can affect humans. In addition, properly managed livestock systems help maintain biodiversity and sustainable land use.”

The AFRI Diseases of Agricultural Animals program focuses on maintaining healthy agricultural animals to ensure a safe and adequate food supply. The program supports research in whole-animal health, including disease prevention and control.

The K-State team's project uses a rancher-developed, precision feed intake measuring system to validate a Bovine Rate of Consumption Index, or BROCI, as an objective measure of animal welfare.

So far, the researchers have noted that high environmental temperatures are associated with reductions in feed intake, milk yield, weight gain and fertility and an increase in cases of lameness.

“We believe BROCI can be accurately measured and correlated with painful and heat stress events,” Coetzee said. “Then it can be validated to support on-farm animal welfare assessment and used as evidence to support the development of heat reduction strategies and pain management protocols.”

The project is part of a unique collaboration with Irvine Ranch, a cattle producer located in Manhattan.

“Irvine Ranch has been developing and utilizing our patented Bovabytes system for the improvement of beef genetics for several years,” said John and Bernard Irvine. “We are excited to partner with Dr. Hans Coetzee and his exceptional staff at Kansas State University in this study and to utilize our technology for the advancement of the broader livestock industry.”

Coetzee said the project will be conducted with three specific objectives. The first objective will be to optimize and validate BROCI and related feeding behaviors as an objective measure of acute pain and analgesic drug efficacy after surgical castration.

The second objective will be to then compare the impact of surgical and non-surgical castration, novel anesthetic-impregnated tension bands, and a unique long-acting systemic pain-relief drug on BROCI.

Third, the researchers will look to optimize and validate the consumption index to assess the effect of heat stress events on beef calf welfare.

Altogether, the project will address the urgent need for innovative, automated and noninvasive methods to assess how cattle are coping with pain and thermal stress, Coetzee said.