The Moos Room™

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Emily: Welcome, everybody, to The Moos Room. OG three here. Feels like it's been a little while since we've all been together, via Zoom of course. Here we are. We are going to be talking about a topic that we have already somewhat covered, but diving into a little more nuts and bolts of some of that. That is related to fairs and going to shows, which of course is happening a lot right now. We got county fairs, state fairs coming up. We have a lot of our district and national shows happening and coming up, state shows, et cetera. A really important and often overlooked component of that is biosecurity.
We were talking before we hit the record button about classifications of being a closed herd and that kind of thing. If you bring animals to a show, you're not a closed herd. You are potentially exposing your herd to a lot of nasty things. We're just going to cover some of the basics. Hopefully this all sounds familiar to you and is already stuff that you all do, but we thought a nice little reminder wouldn't hurt.
There's a lot of different things with biosecurity. Of course we have Dr. Joe here, our resident vet. I'm sure he has a lot of opinions. I want to start, we'll move through a few different things. First being, Joe, what should you be looking for and doing before you go to a show, at the show, and then when you get back, strictly just as the animal is concerned? We'll talk about equipment and stuff later, but just the animal.
Joe: With just the animal, the big thing that we're really looking for is that everyone has to take ownership in this process and identifying the animals that are not fit to go to the fair. There is someone there checking those animals in, and there's a vet that can catch a lot, but they can't catch everything. There's a lot of what I would consider a social contract in this whole deal of everyone having a responsibility to realize how much this could impact someone else. If your animal's sick or there's something wrong with it that could affect other animals, you have to keep it home.
That's the number one message. That applies to everything; warts, ringworm. Even if that seems somewhat minor, that could be very impactful on someone else and their animals, and their operation at home as well. To me, the biggest message is the social contract of all of this, of being responsible and having that conversation with your kids as well, and whoever's showing those animals, that this is an important issue and responsible thing to do, is keep that sick animal home. While you're at the show or the fair, or wherever you're going with your animal, it's tough to keep contact to a minimum with all the other animals.
It's just trying to reduce stress as much as possible so that the animal is in the best condition that it can be in terms of its immune system so that it can handle anything that it does run into. Vaccine plays a big part of this as well. A vaccine is going to-- I think we've all learned a lot about vaccines in the last few year. Vaccines are going to help you, and they're insurance. Just like any vaccine, they're insurance. They decrease the risk of being able to transmit a disease, and it decreases the effect of the disease if the animal does encounter it.
It's tough when you're at the fair. The only other thing is that if you see signs of something that you missed earlier, then you should take your animal home. Because once you're at the fair, we've all seen these shows and these fairs, those animals are packed into pretty old buildings with possibly not great ventilation, and you're not going to keep things from spreading. The only thing you could maybe do is keep your own water supply so you're not sharing drinking water. That's also very, very difficult.
Emily: With that too, I would add that of course at some of our shows, particularly open class shows, probably all your animals in the string are coming from the same farm. When I think about 4-H and FFA, we have a lot of mixing. 4-H for example, you're grouped together by county and you each have one animal. Your animal might be tied up with nine other animals from nine different parts, so there's risk of transmission there. Even if you are in an open class situation where your string is all from one farm, places like the wash rack, if you have tie-outs, in line for the milking parlor, anything like that can lead to disease transmission as well. This is us giving you our words of caution, I guess, on that.
Bradley: One thing that I always think about is we have to take care of the problem before we actually get to the fair. We're not meaning, oh, the night before or a couple days before. When you realize it, you need to be on top of it right away. If there is some warts, you can remove them, or if there is ringworm, you can start to treat that so it's gone by the fair, or whatever else may be happening to those animals.
It needs to be taken care of a month before or even-- It needs to be thought about instead of the night before. Because some fairs have a no-tolerance policy, and that's our county fair. There's many other state fairs and others that don't tolerate even warts on animals. We're not afraid to send animals home, which is horrible in every which way for Youth and 4-H, and stuff. It needs to be taken care of beforehand.
Emily: Like Joe was saying, there's that social contract. Also for me, it just comes down to being an ethical show person. I know it can be heartbreaking to leave a really good cow at home. Just from personal experience, our herd caught ringworm from one of my show heifers that caught it from a heifer from another farm when I was in 4-H. Ringworm spread fast. We never got rid of it in our herd. What you were getting at, Bradley, is if you notice a problem, mitigate as soon as you can.
What our solution was, since it was beyond control basically, once we had the show heifers picked out and we were very fortunate to have one of the last county fairs before state fair, so I had a solid 10, 12 weeks with these animals and I would tie them up in a completely separate building and start treating them so that they would be cleared up by fair, didn't have additional exposure in the moment. Then of course anybody that was going to go to state fair went back to that quarantined housing for the time being as well. Those things, they take more work, but again, it's about being an ethical show person.
Joe: I think one of the things is we keep emphasizing the fact that you need to be thinking about others, which again, we've learned a lot about in the last year. For a lot of people, especially the way things are moving, there's a lot of lead animals, there's a lot of people that just have show cattle. When you just have one animal at home, sometimes it's easy to forget that a lot of these animals are also coming from working commercial farms. The consequences of bringing something back to that commercial farm are much greater than if you have one animal and that animal that you show gets sick. I think that that's something to think about.
This is potentially affecting someone's livelihood and how they make a living. Keeping that in mind, you wouldn't want that to be jeopardized for yourself, and that's what you need to be thinking about while you're at the fair, before the fair, everything. One of the things I forgot to mention at the fair is probably discouraging people from petting your animals, and definitely discouraging them from feeding your animals, whatever animals you do bring. It's just an easy way to-- Whether that's a sign or always having someone with your animals if you can, which is hard to do, but having a sign or something just to keep that from happening. Because I see that quite a bit and it makes me cringe every time.
Bradley: You don't want to have the public or some kids that are walking by your animals be exposed to certain-- ringworm can spread really fast. It can get on kids that don't even know it. I unfortunately have spread it to my baby son when he was little, at home.
Emily: Father of the year.
Bradley: Exactly. That's right. He got ringworm just because if you're not careful, and most people are at fairs are just wanting to pet the animals and do that, but if you have ringworm or whatever, there is a risk of spreading it to the public. Man, we don't need the bad PR in the dairy industry from county fairs or shows.
Emily: Of course if you have ringworm or warts, that animal shouldn't be at the show anyways. Even yes, just from a general biosecurity standpoint, really limiting how much animal-to-people exposure is happening. I know, with 4-H, with FFA, we really encourage these youth to communicate with consumers to do some education and outreach. I know that petting can be a big part of that, but it can also be a teachable moment to say, this is what we do, how we practice the things that we do to keep you safe from these diseases.
You can also help us by being responsible and that kind of thing. I don't think any of us are trying to sound like the grumpy curmudgeons, like, "Don't let anybody pet your cows," but I do think that we can still have that outreach and education with the public and be smart about it, and use it as a way to teach people how we keep their food safe.
Joe: That's a perfect point, because I think that's the way you have to approach it when you're talking to the public. It's always polite. Every interaction is a teaching and a learning opportunity, so I think that is perfect.
Emily: We do work in education, so we have to throw that in every now and again.
Joe: Got to talk with them. Let's talk quickly about what to do with your animal when it gets home, and then let's get into equipment. After the fair, quarantining is a big piece of it. That animals just get exposed to who knows what, and however many animals from all sorts of different situations. When you bring that animal home, if you have other animals at home, making sure that you separate that animal for a period of time. It is a decent amount of time. We're talking three to four weeks if possible.
Ideally that animal would be completely separate. We're talking different barn, different airspace, everything. That's not always possible and I totally get that, but as separate as possible is the idea. Then when you're doing chores or whatever you're doing, getting to that animal at the very end, that's the way to handle it coming home in the ideal world. That always gives you time to see if there's something that the animal picked up, if there's a problem, and you are protecting the rest of your animals at home.
Emily: That's a really great point, Joe. Of course outside of the animal itself, there's all the crap we need to bring to shows. We have buckets, we have feed pans, feed scoops potentially, show halters, rope halters, brushes, and probably 5 million other things. I know, again, especially in 4-H, people usually try to divvy up who brings what just because there's limited space for tack and all of that, but your equipment needs to be prepared to go as well. Cleaning everything, sanitizing everything when you go there, when you get back.
That's really important, because I understand that in some cases you can't avoid sharing, but again, if there's an animal there with ringworm and you're sharing a brush in the wash rack, you are transferring it right onto your animal. If you're going to take that brush home and use it when you wash cows again, your problems are just going to multiply, so making sure that that supplies is being properly cleaned and sanitized again before and after. Dr. Joe, do you have any recommendations for cleaning equipment or specific things people should be aware of?
Joe: With cleaning equipment, it's always tricky because you want to have something that is okay to have around kids, so it's not super caustic but it still does the job. The two that always come to mind are iodine and chlorhexidine. Those two disinfectants are probably the best to use in my mind, and I would encourage people, regardless of whether you think you're going to share equipment or if you're going to say I'm not going to share equipment, there's going to be situations when you get to the fair, someone forgot something, you're not going to want to say no to your friend or your neighbor who forgot a brush or whatever it is.
I would encourage them to bring disinfectant to the show, because there's going to be something that you need to clean while you're there, and you don't want to be without it. Those are the two that I like to work with best. Then sunshine. Clean, disinfectant if you can, but the sun is a great disinfectant. Then just keeping everything dry. Clean, dry, sunlight and then a disinfectant. All of those things are working for you when you need to clean something.
It gets hard when you're talking about ropes and halters, and things like that though, so definitely certain things I would try not to share. Halters and things that are hard to clean go right to the top of the list. I've got a question for Bradley. We always make fun of Bradley because his fair has a three-stall rapid exit parlor and it's quite amazing and he gets it working every year and it's ready to go for everybody. How does that work for biosecurity? Are you guys sharing units, or how are you guys working that?
Bradley: I'm the dairy superintendent, so I have a strict cleaning policy. We do lots of fun stuff with demonstration milkings and all the public type stuff that is all good in promoting the dairy industry, but we make everything clean afterwards. The same cows are using the same stalls. It's pretty strict. We clean with iodine afterwards and sanitize solutions. We try and keep things clean just because everybody else has different cows and we don't want to pass whatever may be.
Even from a mastitis standpoint, we typically don't let everybody milk their cows at the same time, just to not spread mastitis. If a cow were to have have mastitis, we just don't want to have issues spread back and forth, because we just don't know what cow has staph aureus or something like that. We certainly don't want that spread from one cow to the next. We're probably over cautious, but I think it's a good thing.
Emily: No such thing as over cautious. You're crushing it, Bradley. Dr. Joe gave him a thumbs up, so the vet approves. Keep doing your thing.
Bradley: Oh, my gosh, that's like the first time ever that you gave me a thumbs up. I must have done something right today.
Joe: I give you a thumbs up all the time, Bradley.
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Emily: All right, I feel like the main points we really covered are just be responsible with your animals, be responsible with your equipment. Again, there is that social contract in place to be a responsible and ethical show person, so we encourage you to do that. Quarantine those animals after they get home, please, please, please, we beg you. With that, I think we are going to wrap this short and sweet episode. If you have questions, comments, scathing rebuttals, you can email those to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Joe: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Emily: Find us on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety. If you are at the state fair, please be sure to check out the livestock exhibits. Bradley, Joe, and I will be running around, so if you see us, please say hello. We hope that you all have a safe and fun show season here. Bye-bye.
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