The Moos Room™

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Joe Armstrong: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. This is Dr. Joe Armstrong. Today it's just me and we're talking about a pet peeve of mine. Surprise, surprise, I'm back on my soapbox. One of the things that I see, I get questions about a lot of the time is to look at vaccine protocols and see what's going on. Is this the right thing to do? What should I add? What should I take away? Those kind of things.
Again, big disclaimer, you should always be talking to your veterinarian to figure out what's best for your operation because they know your system much better than I do. Now, that being said, I can certainly look at a protocol and definitively say there's too much going on that's not too hard to do if we're giving a ton of vaccines, which definitely happens. My argument being, let's try to get to the root of the problem.
If we can, prevent everything from management side of things and then take out vaccines that aren't absolutely necessary. Rightly so some vaccines have to stay in, whether they're part of the core vaccines that every cow should see or there's just a management problem that's going wrong that we can't seem to get our hands around and we can't seem to get it fixed. We want that extra insurance, which is what vaccines really are insurance, risk mitigation.
Those vaccines stay in, and that's fine. What worries me is when I see a protocol where there is just a ridiculous amount of vaccines going in. This happens, especially for whatever reason, in dairy beef. The classic scenario that I'm talking about here is a feedlot that gets in a group of lightweight Holstein or Holstein cross calves and they have vaccine records on them. Then I get to see those vaccine records and we're talking an absolute ridiculous amount of shots.
I think the most I've seen on one of those protocols is 21 different injectable vaccines going into these calves before they're 90 days old, 21. That is way too much, completely unnecessary, and it's actually hurting those calves. Now, whatever your view on vaccines, the fact is they're incredibly safe but that does not mean giving a vaccine is completely benign. For the animal's immune system to respond, it takes energy to run the immune system.
So by giving a vaccine, you're asking that animal to provide that energy to the immune system and respond. Really, when we're talking about vaccines, the act of giving a vaccine itself, having to handle that animal, having an injection happen with a needle, that process itself is stressful. Then that animal is using energy to respond to that vaccine with its immune system. That process, because it's using energy, can be viewed as stress.
I think the danger here is that we've viewed vaccines as safe, which they are. They're incredibly safe, but they aren't benign. We're doing something to that animal, handling them all by itself. Running cattle through a chute if we're talking older animals, handling dairy calves. Anytime we touch them, there's stress involved. You combine that stress with the potential stress of a needle or an intranasal, there's stress all around.
On top of that, we're adding an energy demand, which is stress on the body. I don't know where these protocols come from, where we have a ridiculous number of vaccines in the protocol. I really don't want to believe that I have colleagues in my profession, the veterinary profession, that are knowingly suggesting that this is the right thing to do to calves at this age. When we're talking calves that young with injectables, I understand that some people may have arguments where they just want to do injectables over intranasals.
They want the protection against BVD. That's fine. If that's the decision you want to make, go for it. There is absolutely no reason to do it over and over and over and over and over again, that is ridiculous. It's costing the producer a ridiculous amount of money for the vaccine itself. It's costing the next person in the chain a ridiculous amount of money because of the shape those cattle are in going to the feedlot.
It's maddening. Unfortunately, it reflects incredibly poorly on my profession if there are veterinarians out there that are recommending these protocols, it's disappointing. That's all I can really say. Overall, I'm saying you can over vaccinate and that can be an issue. I'm saying I'm disappointed in some of these vaccine protocols that I see that are incredibly intense early in life, where we see 15, 17, 20 shots going into calves before they're 60 or 90 days old.
I think as a rule, you need to treat vaccines as if they're not benign. They cause stress, especially just the act of getting it to the animal. Handling calves in any way is stressful for the calf. Handling cattle in any way is stressful for the cattle. When it's 20 below and the wind is howling and you just got a group of cattle in, is that the right time to vaccinate them? Probably not.
They're already experiencing quite a bit of stress from a change in environment, possibly a change in diet. Now the weather is stressing them out with how cold it is. Now is not the time to add a vaccine on top of that and stack that stress where they are going to have an even further energy demand from the vaccine. We're going to add stress to the system by handling them, not the time.
Our goal from a management standpoint is to get these vaccines in the cattle at the appropriate time and limit our stress as much as possible. That means separating events when we can and when it's practical with regard to other management procedures or other things that cause stress. This is a main focus for a lot of veterinarians when we are designing vaccine protocols is how do we put vaccines in in a way that we don't cause too much stress all at once, and separating other stressful events from vaccines as well?
Sometimes that's not possible, but that's usually the goal. Do I really want to dehorn an animal, castrate it, and give a vaccine all on the same day? Probably not. That's a lot going on. A lot of stress at once. I guess what I'm saying today is, if you own a feedlot, you're looking at buying Holstein calves or Holstein cross calves. I think it's really valid at this point to ask for a vaccine history.
In a lot of cases, less is more. You don't want to be nothing there because I would say that if you're getting calves in at the age where they're 250 or 300 pounds, I'd love to have had them see something. If you get that vaccine history on this group of cattle and it looks ridiculous, 10, 15, 20 shots into these cattle before you get them, I would really, really caution you on buying that group.
I think performance on that group is incredibly, incredibly low, and morbidity and mortality are incredibly high. It's going to be tempting to buy that group, 100% tempting, because the price is going to be low. The price is that low for a reason in that situation. I mean, I'm not talking 5% death loss or 10%. I'm talking 20% 25%, 30% sometimes on death loss because of how poorly their life has been managed so far.
All right. That's a lot of soapboxing for today, and I appreciate you sticking with it. If you're still here and still listening, I don't mind throwing this opinion out there into the wind and seeing what it picks up. I'd love to hear some comments, questions, scathing rebuttals to this. Definitely, a conversation I'm willing to have with anybody who's listening. Comments, questions, or scathing rebuttals go to themoosroom@umn.edu.
That's T-H-E M-O-O-S R-O-O-M @umn.edu. You can find us on Twitter at UMNMoosRoom and at UMNFarmSafety. Find Bradley on Instagram at UMNWCROC dairy. Thank you, everybody. We'll catch you next week. Bye.
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