When the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) began to muse about requiring that cattle be unloaded and provided with a rest stop after 36 hours of transportation, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and Canada’s beef industry funded a series of research projects led by Karen Schwartzkopf-Genswein’s team at AAFC’s Lethbridge Research Station to determine whether a rest stop would benefit weaned calves. The research began before the regulations were revised, but the regulations were revised before the research could be completed.
Three consecutive research trials conducted in 2018, 2019 and 2020 found that providing a rest stop during long haul transportation offered no consistent, measurable benefits for animal welfare. A companion project led by Trevor Alexander at AAFC Lethbridge looked at bacterial populations in the respiratory tract of those same calves. In September 2023, this column described how microbiological testing from the 2018 transportation trial found that rested calves had more bacteria associated with bovine respiratory disease (BRD) in their respiratory tract than unrested calves. The microbiological results from the 2019 and 2020 transport trials reports were published recently (Providing a rest stop during transportation affects the respiratory microbiota of beef cattle doi: 10.3389/fcimb.2025.1622241).
What They Did
This report presented the results of the last two long-distance rest-stop transportation trials conducted by AAFC Lethbridge in 2019 and 2020. To recap, in the fall of 2019, 320 newly weaned crossbred steer calves from one ranch were delivered to the research station. They were processed and adapted to the feedlot diet and environment for four weeks to ensure that the effects of weaning stress had passed and would not interfere with their response to transportation. After four weeks they were loaded, transported for 36 hours, and unloaded. Half of the calves were immediately reloaded and hauled four more hours to the research facility. The other half were rested in pens with bedding, feed and water for 12 hours, reloaded and hauled the final four hours to the research facility.