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Preventing Scours

Careful management can help reduce the negative effects of scours in your herd.

Many ranchers see a few cases of diarrhea in young calves, and some years are worse than others. Scours is often due to multiple factors, including exposure to pathogens and stress. Good weather, clean ground and stress reduction (including shelter from bad weather and minimal confinement) can help reduce the incidence of scours.

Chris Clark, associate professor of large-animal medicine for the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, says there are two aspects to scours prevention.

“You can try to make sure calves are more resistant to the pathogens, and also try to reduce the number of pathogens [that calves are exposed to] that cause scours,” says Clark.

Boosting immunity involves consumption of colostrum. There must be a high level of antibodies in the colostrum and the calf must nurse enough soon after birth to be adequately protected.

“Make sure cows are up to date on vaccinations, and vaccinated relatively close to when they start calving. Then, the immunity level will be highest. Make sure the cow is in good body condition before calving, with proper level of nutrients when she gives birth. This ensures that she can produce the best and largest amount of colostrum,” he says.

“If you need to give a calf colostrum, it should be as much colostrum as possible and as fast as possible. This means about six pints in the first six hours and another six pints in the following six hours for the best opportunity to absorb adequate antibodies," he adds.

The other part of the battle is a clean calving area.

“You don’t want cows in a wet, sloppy environment with manure on their teats. Otherwise that first mouthful of milk will be loaded with pathogens,” Clark says. It’s always a race between the pathogens and the antibodies in the colostrum, regarding which gets to the gut first.

“A lot depends on the time of year you calve,” says Clark. “If weather isn’t cold (necessitating grouping the cows for shelter), you can spread cows out more on clean pastures. Clean ground or green grass is ideal, but if you calve early (before cows go out to range pastures, or to have seedstock bulls old enough for sale), you have to balance this.”

If you experience a scours outbreak in early spring during a thaw, the best thing to do could be to just kick all the cows and calves out into a field and spread them out. Cows are very hard to keep clean when it’s wet and sloppy, and even if you try to keep them clean by putting out more bedding, you still can’t win, he says.

Some years are just harder to prevent scours than others.

“When you do everything right, you are loading the dice in your favor, but you still have to roll the dice. A conscientious producer who tries hard to manage for scours prevention may have an outbreak once every 10 years or so rather than every year. It’s not that you can prevent all scours, every year. It’s how often you have to deal with scours,” says Clark.

“I’ve known some good stockmen who get upset when they deal with scours, asking what they should do next year to prevent this, but everything they were doing was right. It was just a bad year. There might be some small things they could change, but if what they’ve been doing has been working for many years, they shouldn’t change everything,” he notes.

They may have to treat some calves, but they can still come out all right if they are diligent.

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Editor’s Note: Heather Smith Thomas is a freelance writer and cattlewoman from Salmon, Idaho.



 



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