Postmortem Exams Can Save Lives
Unexplained deaths need to be investigated.
Veterinarian W. Mark Hilton, clinical associate professor of beef production medicine at Purdue University, tells producers their dead calf is worth nothing, but a dead calf with a diagnosis can be the most valuable animal on the farm. Knowing the cause of death may help prevent future deaths on down the road.
“I feel good when a producer calls me out to necropsy a 2-month-old calf and I open it up and find it ate some twine and got plugged up,” says Hilton. It’s a relief to know it’s just a freak incident.
“The owner may be initially disappointed because he spent money for a necropsy, but it’s great to find out that this is not a herd-wide problem or tip-of-the-iceberg situation. By contrast, if someone has 150 cows and lost seven calves in a day, they recognize this is a serious situation and usually call me immediately. If those seven calves are lost over a three-week period of time, however, the owner may not get as excited and might try to rationalize or guess at causes of death,” says Hilton. A necropsy might have helped prevent the other losses.
“If a cow or calf dies suddenly — an unexplained death — I want to see the first case, and not wait until the second or third one,” he says. Otherwise, the producer may regret not having checked them, if additional animals die.
“I am pretty aggressive on getting young calves necropsied because it is important to find out whether they died of pneumonia or scours. I was in private practice for 15 years, and one of my main jobs now as a university veterinarian is to tell clients to use their herd-health veterinarian, and have him/her out on the farm occasionally. It’s amazing how many times I go onto a farm and notice something the owner doesn’t see,” says Hilton. If you look at something every day you may be used to it or not as inquisitive as someone seeing it with fresh eyes.
“One herd was having a terrible coccidiosis problem in young calves. They couldn’t reach the water troughs and were drinking out in the field, which was heavily contaminated with manure. We filled in the low areas that collected water, and fenced out some parts of the field so calves wouldn’t have access to so much groundwater, and the problem went away,” he says. If he hadn’t been out to the farm, he would have never seen the cause, he adds.
“Often veterinarians are reluctant to spend our clients’ money, but considering the dollars a stockman has invested in his operation, spending $100 or so for a necropsy to try to prevent future losses is not unreasonable,” says Hilton. Sometimes you can make an immediate management change, knowing the cause of death. If the animal ate poisonous plants, for instance, you could prevent more deaths by moving the cattle out of that pasture. Any unexplained death needs to be investigated.
Editor’s Note: Heather Smith Thomas is a freelancer and cattlewoman located near Salmon, Idaho.