Baa's and Bleat's - The AASRP Podcast
Baa's and Bleat's - The AASRP Podcast
Disbudding Pain Management with Dr. Whitney Knauer
Join us for a discussion about a study that looks at ways to mitigate the pain of disbudding kids with Dr. Whitney Knauer of the Department of Veterinary Population Medicine at the University of Minnesota
In this episode we discuss a 2022 paper looking at the different effects of 3 types of prevention and treatment for the process of disbudding goat kids. This paper is titled Effects of Multimodal Pain Management Strategies on Acute Physiological and Behavioral Response to Cautery Disbudding in Neonatal Goat Kids and can be found at
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36870841/
Questions can be sent to Dr. Knauer at knaue020@umn.edu
If your company or organization would like to sponsor an episode or if you have questions about today's show, email Office@AASRP.org
Hello, here we are. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Whitney Kanauer, a faculty member at the Vet School at the University of Minnesota. It's great to see you. How are you doing today?
Whitney:Great. Thank you for the invitation to chat with you today. And as we were chatting about earlier, it's one of the first really nice days in Minnesota. So things are good here.
Sarah:Yeah, it's beautiful in New York. Of course, it wasn't beautiful a few days ago when we had the eclipse, but it's beautiful today. So we are recording in April, as you guys can tell. So if you don't mind, let's just start with a little bit of history, a little bit about where you went to school and how you got to where you are, and um kind of how you developed an interest in small ruminants and a little bit about your history.
Whitney:Sure. So I'm from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania originally. So not from a farm background, but grew up surrounded by farms and was a horse girl growing up. Wanted to be a veterinarian from a very young age. Went to undergrad at the University of Vermont, and that's where I sort of fell in love with cattle and dairy cows specifically. From there, I went to Penn for vet school. So I graduated in 2010, moved on to do an internship in residency at Cornell in ambulatory and production medicine. And that's where I got to work with Dr. Mary Smith. She was my supervisor, and she's the one who taught me that you should always be nervous when disbudding goat kids. So I have that to credit to her, and that's something that I teach the students here as well at Minnesota. So then from there, I've always had an interest in welfare and in calves and dairy calves. And so came to Minnesota in 2013 to do my PhD with Dr. Sandra Gotten. And that was mostly focused on dairy calves and group house calves and trying to understand if we can use feeding behavior to detect disease. Spoiler alert, not we can't very well, but there are people who are working on that now, so and learning more about that. And then was hired on in facult as faculty in 2017, so was lucky enough to get hired here. And what my role is to teach veterinary students. So most of my teaching is small ruminant and dairy clinical and production medicine. And then my research is focused on improving the welfare of young ruminants. And so my my research focus is both calves, goat kids, and then a little bit of lamb work, but not too much. So mostly that.
Sarah:Awesome, awesome. Well, we graduated from vet school in the same year. Being in New York, obviously Dr. Mary Smith is like a god here. Most of the vets I work with went to Cornell, and all the small animal people were a little bit scared of her, but all the large animal people just, you know, love her and think she's wonderful. So she is a rock in the small ruminant world for sure. Um, okay, so today we're gonna be talking to Dr. Kanaur about her 2022 paper. As you know, for this season of Boz and Bleats, we're talking to people who have recent research out in small ruminants and going over that recent research with them. So today's paper that we're gonna be talking about is entitled The Effects of Multimodal Pain Management Strategies on Acute Physiological and Behavioral Response to Cottery Disbutting of Neonatal Goat Kids. This was published in the Journal of Dairy Science. And, you know, any of us who are practitioners out there, I literally two minutes before I sat down, I was disc budding goats in my garage. I mean, this is just like what we do all the time. And so, you know, we all should have a welfare bent, right? If we are veterinarians, we should care. Like we raise animals for food, but they should absolutely have the best life they can while we are raising them. So I hope every large animal that thinks says they have a welfare bent also. This paper is just super interesting. I can't wait to dig our teeth into it together. The results are really interesting, not at all exactly what I expected. So that's really interesting. So start from the beginning, give us a little bit of background, give us your intro. Just yeah, tell us how it went.
Whitney:Sure. Um, so this research sort of spurred from an interest in goat kids and trying to think of what or what don't we know about goat kids. And you know, we we teach vet students to disbud, we disbud goat kids, and we really went back in 2018 digging into the literature, this was kind of before Dr. Melissa Hempstead had done a lot of the or had published a lot of the work that she was doing during during her PhD. She's done a lot of work in this area as well. There just wasn't a lot out there. And so, and then the other thing is, you know, and I know a lot about disbudding calves, and we know a lot as a scientific community, as veterinarians, and the the standard of care is a local anesthetic block, so a lidocaine block and a non-strolled anti-inflammatory, and that like suppresses acute pain response in in calves. But when digging into the literature on lidocaine for goat kids, it seemed like that was a response that wasn't universal and that goat kids actually seemed to find lidocaine aversive on injection. And so that is one piece of like it seems like we really don't know a lot. And so we wanted to dig into this. The other piece is that, you know, if you look at some of the data that was recently published from NOMS, we know that the majority of disbudding is happening on farms by owners. So about 75% of folks are disbutting their own animals, and only 30% are using pain management. So most of the veterinarians that are disbutting animals, you know, that are disbutting goat kids are using like gold standard, you know, probably controlled drugs. And so our idea here was to evaluate things that can be practically applied on the farm. Certainly, this was before all of the xylosine challenge that we had a couple years ago or last year, and I don't know that I would ever leave xylosine on a farm, but we were thinking of kind of what are the what are the possibilities of providing this this pain management and providing a sedative um which has some some pain management component to it. So that would be the xylosine, the the maloxicam, so that's a non-steroidal, like an aspirin, and then a local block. And and one of the things that that is different in our study than some of the studies that have come out or have been published is that we use buffered lidocaine. So one of the challenges with lidocaine is that it's very um acidic, so it has a pH of like four, and so on injection, that's painful. And so one of the things that one of the hypotheses was that maybe that's the reason the goat kids find it diversive, because you know, there's just not a lot of skin there in their in their little head, and so maybe that is what is causing that pain response to that lidocaine injection. And so we use buffered lidocaine, so we basically um added a bicarbonate, so a basic solution to bring that pH up. And so that is kind of we we wanted to look at and then single modality, so we wanted to look at things by themselves, and then we wanted to look at things in combination. So, again, sort of the the goal of this paper and this study was to identify the kind of perfect combination or at least of the things that we were looking at. And you know, our hope really was that meloxican by itself would be great, and so that we could recommend that you know, just a simple pill for each goat kid would be able to, you know, provide that acute pain relief. But that it is not, we'll get into it, but that's not what we found.
Sarah:Yeah. Okay, so I'm just gonna do a little explanation for you here. You had seven treatment groups. The first group was what you called the sham group, so they were just handled similarly to everybody else. They were not disbutted because they had no pain or anything on board, but that's very common in research to have something that you're just handling. Group two had xylosine only, group three had the lidocaine block sub Q. Group four was oral meloxicam given 20 minutes before disbutting. Group five was xylosine and lidocaine, group six was xylosine and meloxicam, and then group seven was all three xylosine, lidocaine, and maloxicam. Um, okay, so you want to just go through and tell us uh what you did on the study and um kind of the how you picked these goats, um, just the uh methods, I guess.
Whitney:Sure. Yes, well, we're we're pretty lucky that we have a goat farm that we work with quite closely. And so essentially what we did is we were they allowed us to rent these goat kids for the week. And so we received them. They all actually got an antibiotic injection at arrival that is to mitigate some of the potential respiratory disease. We just didn't want them to get sick. They the the day before disbudding, we shaved their little heads and we shaved their necks because we were going to be doing, we wanted to sort of isolate the effective handling because we did handle them quite a bit on the disbudding day. And then we the I guess the outcomes or the things that we were interested in looking at were some physiologic measures. So we looked at cortisol, which is a stress hormone. So it's not really a great measurement of pain, but it is a measurement of stress. We also looked at prostaglandin E, and so that is a prostaglandin that should be suppressed by a non-steroid. It's released an inflammatory and inflamed tissue. And then we looked, we did, we did body weights, and so that was that was every day. So from the day of arrival until they they left a week later. We did mechanical no-susceptive threshold testing, um, which is a fancy way of saying pain sensitivity testing. Um, so we're interested in kind of what those goat kids were experiencing after they were disbudded. And then we um we looked at behavior. And so one of the sort of novel or different things about this study compared to what has been published in the past, is that we did follow these goats for two days post-despudding. Most of the studies they look at kids maybe for a day after, but like most of the behaviors are recorded in like the hour after desputting, maybe even the 24 hours, but not following them for multiple days. And the reason that we wanted to do that is because some of these treatments, particularly meloxicam, is should have a long-ranging effect. And so we wanted to kind of see, you know, after a couple days, what would these goat kids be experiencing? So we it was pretty intensive. We had a lot of students, a lot of a lot of help, a lot of people doing a lot of things, but we we just fed those 42 kids over over two days and then did all those measurements in the in the interim. The also, the other thing um that's you know, from a management standpoint, these goat kids um got fed three times a day, um, about 20% body weight. So, and they were getting um pasteurized goat milk.
Sarah:Great, great. Um, so yeah, I I really like the component of watching behavior because I mean it's obviously it's very subjective, but that's what producers and the rest of us in the world are looking at, right? To kind of determine. And when you guys read this paper, my favorite absolute thing is that they measured how many times the goats parkoured off each other because there's no better way to describe what baby goats do. I when I saw that term in your paper, I was like, yes, that's exactly what baby goats do.
Whitney:Yeah, we we had a lot of fun. So the way that that works, right, is you look at other papers. So it's called an ethogram, which is just a list of behaviors, and there there wasn't really a there, there was many that were focused on pain and sort of head-related behaviors, and maybe some focused on play, but we were seeing that behavior, and that's the only term that we could think of to describe it. So, yeah, I think we're the first ones to have that in a published paper, so we're really excited about that.
Sarah:I love it, I love it, and made me very happy. And just remind me, so they only got the meloxicam 20 minutes before, they did not get any follow-up.
Whitney:Correct, and that that's a really important question is should we be giving multi-day maloxicam? And I will say that we just got a USDA grant rejected, where we had that was one of our objectives to look at that question is is what is the impact of you know giving multiple days on post-disputting? So, yes, we we only give it 20 minutes before, and all the treatments have been 20 minutes before.
Sarah:Okay, and you use the oral meloxicam just because it's cheaper, more readily available kind of thing. Correct.
Whitney:And in this study, so we we would have preferred because we wanted to get the right dose in the right kid, so all these kids were weighed and the treatments were, you know, each one was different specific to that goat kid. We we actually use meloxidil, so we use like the small animal oral equivalent rather than the tablets, because the tablets, you know, if we have a 3.5 kilogram kid and we're trying to give 3.5 milligrams, that's really hard to do with a five milligram tablet because they're so small. So we chose to use that oral formulation so that we can really give the appropriate dose at one bing per cake.
Sarah:Yeah, nice, nice. Yeah, I use the the tablets on calves when I disbud them, but I just do injectable on on kids because again, it's same you can get to the right dose. Okay, so I guess we're ready to jump into the results. And I'm just yeah, I mean, I think any of us that disbud kids know that lidocaine does not work as well. And you know, I was always taught you can do the corneal nerve next to the eye, like we do in calves, but it doesn't work as well. You really need to do a ring block. Well, anyone who has tried to do that has realized there's just not a lot of sub cute space there, and you think you know the perfect spot, and it's the perfect spot in one kid and not the perfect spot in the next kid, and I end up getting lidocaine absolutely everywhere. So even if you told me lidocaine ring block was like the solution, it's still not easy. Like it's a really difficult thing to do.
Whitney:Yep, agreed. I you know, I think that's the challenge too, is that you know, if we're doing the four spots that we should, right? The the four branches of the nerves that's you know, one sort of up over the eye and one sort of in the in the groove between the eye or the lateral part of the eye, outside of the eye, up to the horn, but that's four, that's four pokes, right? That we have to stick that kid. The other challenge with lidocaine is that goats are goat kids are tiny and there is a toxic dose. And so when we think about that, we only really have about one milliliter, one cc of lidocaine to play with in a goat kid. And so that makes it challenging too. So yeah, it's a challenge, it's a it's a challenging thing. And I think like from a from a frag, again, like I really had wished that meloxicam or like xylozy maloxicam would have been the would be able to manage or mitigate the acute pain, but the those groups were it seemed like the lidocaine was needed, but lidocaine in and of itself doesn't seem to be enough. And we so my colleague who's on the paper, Dr. Emily Borel. So she's my she's a large animal internal medicine person, and she's my uh partner in crime and small ruminant teaching. And so we we have conversations about this, and one of our hypotheses is that like we can't block the periosteum, we're probably hitting that, you know, there's probably some other things going on. Maybe you know, the meninges is heating up, I don't know, but there's there's just such little skin and such little skull that you know, I just don't know if lidocaine is enough. And so it's it's just a challenging thing.
Sarah:Yeah, and I mean we do it with them asleep. I can't imagine trying to hit specific spots with them awake, you know. So just back to lidocaine again. So just if we are gonna do it, which I think we all should still keep doing it, and maybe producers too, just roughly your one cc of lidocaine, how much uh bicarb are you putting with that out of the bicarb bottle?
Whitney:Yeah, so what we do is we take a red top tube and we put we do a nine to one dilution. So it's nine mils of lidocaine and then one mil of eight point four percent sodium bicarb. And so the way you know it works is that it gets a little cloudy. That's how you know you put the right thing in the in the right place. And so then that what you get then is a it's a solution that is 18 megs per mil roughly. And so then, you know, we can be pretty confident that if we're pulling a mil of that, even in sort of more more smaller kids, we're probably gonna be okay. And then what we do is we we draw up a mill and then we we use a 22 gauge, like half-inch needle, and we we put a quarter mil in each of those four spots. And your comment that you know it's much easier to do when they're asleep, absolutely. So, like in this study, we gave them meloxicam, the order was always maloxicam, xylazine, and then we would wait for the kids to to fall asleep um before we did that lidocaine. And it just makes it that much easier to get it into the right spot.
unknown:Okay.
Sarah:And is there like, was that when your 20 minutes started when you gave the lidocaine, or how much time did you give between lidocaine and disbudding?
Whitney:Yeah, so that's a that's a good question. I I haven't I've got the paper here, but I don't think we described that in the paper. At least 15 minutes. So there was at least 15 minutes between, you know, when the kids got lidocaine and when we disbudded them. So plenty of time for that lidocaine to have um to have a chance to have an effect.
Sarah:Okay, okay, good to know, yeah. And I mean, you know, lidocaine does work pretty fast, but if you're asking it to disperse, then you need to give it a little more time. Okay, all right. So, what do you want to talk about next? Do you want to talk about the blood results or the behavior results?
Whitney:Let's talk about the blood results. Okay. So, so again, what we'll talk about cortisol because PGE, the those results were confusing, and we still don't really know what was happening there. But the the cortisol, so we again we had those cortisol results or 20 minutes prior, so that was like our baseline, and then we had um 10 minutes prior, one minute before, one minute after, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, and then you know, two hours, four hours, six, twelve. So then, and then they kind of spread out a little more. And then we what we really did because we didn't really see anything happening after 60 minutes, we kind of honed in on that um first 60 minutes post his studying. Um, and again, cortisol is so it's not a perfect measure, but it's a measure of stress. So there is a response associated with handling, probably. So in most of those kids, there was an increase in cortisol after that initial handling, after that 20 minutes. Even the sham kids. Correct. Yeah, even the sham kids, yeah. Which is interesting. The sham kids didn't really behave the same as they've, you know, as kids have in other studies. So uh it some of those results are are a little confusing because there are some of them, the their cortisol is even though it's not a statistical difference, their cortisol is like the highest of that 10 minutes post, or 10 minutes post that first initial treatment or prior to despudding. So what we saw is that 15 minutes post-budding, the malox, the kids that just got meloxicam and the kids that just got lidocaine had higher cortisol as compared to the kids that had the three way combination of xylozine, maloxicam, and lidocaine. So, what that tells me, and then everything else was sort of was the same. So, what that is telling us is that lidocaine alone and meloxicam alone is not enough to mitigate the acute pain response, or at least the acute pain response. That we can show with cortisol. There was also a difference. So if you look at kind of the graph over time, the kids that got the xylosine, meloxicane, and lidocaine, their cortisol was pretty steady over that first 60 minutes. And then many of the others, the other groups had an increase, particularly at that 15-minute time point. So the the other result there is that the kids with the xylosine, meloxicam, and lidocaine on board had lower overall cortisol than kids that just got lidocaine. So again, suggesting that that three-way combination is superior to just maloxicam or just lidocaine.
Sarah:Was it just suggesting or was it significantly significant?
Whitney:It so at 15 minutes, it was statistically significant. Okay. And over the entire period, the lidocaine was worse, performed worse than the xylosema meloxycamin and lidocaine combination.
Sarah:Okay. No surprise, right?
Whitney:Like, yes, that's what we think. That's exactly what what we thought would happen, right? Um that yeah, that's what we thought would happen.
Sarah:Okay. Anything else with blood that we want to talk about? Did you put did you catheterize these babies?
Whitney:No, we didn't. And the reason for that is because they were group housed, and so we were really nervous, and so they're so exploratory, right? And so we were really nervous that they would like yank out their catheters overnight, and then we would arrive to not a great situation in the morning. So we did not. We uh we stuck them each time. I had a crew of vet students trained to do that, so so yeah, we did think about it, but we didn't do that in this study.
Sarah:Yeah, no, you couldn't have. No, they're goats, they're not calves. They would have for sure been out. Okay, so moving on to the behavior stuff, which is just what I frankly do not understand. So go ahead and tell us what you got you saw with their behavior.
Whitney:Okay, so we'll start out with the behavior during disbutting. We saw no differences, so no statistical differences, right? And so the behaviors that we were looking at, so we had video cameras on these um goat kids, and the behaviors that we were looking at were tail flicks, struggle, so that was defined as like the kid like pulling their shoulder up. That was something that we could see consistently in those videos, and then vocalization. So we counted you know the number of vocalizations that they had during the disbutting procedure. And you know, we didn't see any statistical differences here, but I will say that we did see some some numeric ones. So, particularly in vocalizations, the kids that just got meloxicam vocalized um 28 times in 60 seconds. So the the average time of disbudding or the average time from um the time the first the iron went on the first bud to the time that we were done disbudding was about 60 seconds, and so that's about a vocalization every two seconds, so that's quite a bit of vocalizing, and then you know, that was pretty much pretty much higher than every other group, which was around 20 vocalizations. Even the sedated ones were crying. Yeah, that's that's xylosine. So I I think the you know, it's really interesting because these kids, you give them the xylosine, they fall asleep, they're asleep, you set them in your lap, and then you apply the iron and they wake up. So I think it's just the probably the and this is something that I've heard from other folks who have used xylosine. Like I know a lot of people really like um dexmet um or detomidine, um, which is you know, the dexmet particularly is a small animal, alpha 2, and seems to have a more consistent approach, more consistent sedation. But you know, these kids, we disbudded them and then they went right back to sleep. So they slept um on average about 45 minutes or so from the the time they got their initial injection and then through disbutting. I should also mention that our disbud, the disbudding procedure that we use is we do a three seconds on um approach. And so we sort of hold the iron on um for three seconds. We count one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, we go to the other bud and then we wait for that head to cool. So we feel kind of with the back of our hands to make sure things have cooled and then proceed until we get that nice copper ring to signify the the end of the studding. So, you know, these kids, if you're doing, you know, some folks, probably more on the producer side, will just hold the iron on for like 10 seconds, and in that way, then probably that might be a reason, I guess, is is why we had so many vocalizations because the kids were being, you know, restrained um for that period of time. But again, we did see that numeric difference. Those maloxicam kids were definitely feeling feeling things. The other difference that we saw for the numeric difference that we saw was in the struggle, struggle behavior. And so the kids that just got lidocaine, even though like the vocalizations were similar to the other groups except for maloxicam, the tail flex were similar, they had less struggles. And so I don't I don't know what that means, but it was it was consistent over the uh or consistent, the kids were consistently lower than the other kids that were in the other treatments. So, you know, different, you know, numeric differences. And so, you know, one of the challenges is this study was powered, or you know, our sample size was to detect that cortisol difference. And so behavior, we know any of us who worked with any animal know that behavior is very individual, and so it's probably true that we would need um more animals to show if there was actually a difference in some of these behaviors, particularly during disbudding.
Sarah:Interesting, yeah. Personally use a ketamine rompin torb combo, and not this season, but last kidding season, there was something wrong with my meds and they weren't sedating, and it was a huge difference. And I I have a no-skur guarantee. So if you have a scur, I will fix it for free. And I had in my career up to that point done three, and last season I did 22. And so it was such a huge difference if they don't hold still. I don't know how producers do a good job, honestly. But I threw away all I just disposed of all of those meds and started with fresh bottles, and then it was fine. I don't know if I had a bad batch of ketamine or what. But I don't know, I don't know how people do it awake, frankly, and don't get horrible scurs. And I know there are people, you know, we have a guy who like everyone takes their votes to to get disbuded if it's not a vet. And I'm just like, how does he do it with them wiggling and fighting? I don't, I don't understand. But so I guess it makes sense if it's just Drake ketamine. It's not the same as those of us that can use controlled substances are using. And yeah, I know you said you would never like we're probably past leaving xylazine on the farm, and that's a great idea, but I don't think it's happening in practice. I think I have never left xylosine on a farm, but I think lots of people still do, and I think lots of people have bottles out there that they're getting from sketchy sources. So maybe we can use your sketchy xylosine to do this, please.
Whitney:Yeah, I mean, I would say the the what we usually do is we dilute it. So because it's such small, like tiny, tiny volumes, it's like you know, we're we're giving these kids usually 0.1 mil grams, so 0.05 times five kilograms on average, right? And which means that you know, pulling up even a 20 the 20 meg per mil, pulling it that up into a syringe is very challenging. So we do dilute it one to ten. So we end up with like a so one mil a liter of 20 mg per mil xylazine and nine mils of sterile water or sterile saline. So we have a two meg per mil solution, and so like I would feel more comfortable leaving that on the farm, but I still makes me nervous. Um and you dilute that just with sterile water. Okay, yep. Right, it works for it works really nicely because then we can just use a little tuberculin syringe and and draw up, you know, the amount we need and give it give it I am in most leg muscles.
Sarah:Okay. So so there were some interesting like post findings, right? A little bit of difference. So let's talk about that quick.
Whitney:Yeah, so I think one of the things that I think is really interesting about particularly the behavior is that it it shows or what we showed is that um we did see some big differences from baseline and kid behavior, particularly the like the day of disbutting, and and sometimes the day after two, but these kids really changed their behavior um on the day that they were dysbudded. And the mostly most of the behaviors that decrease are like play-like behaviors, so these kids are less playful, as well as some of the head directed behaviors. So they're they're spoiler, like they're less likely to head butt each other because probably you know their head it hurts a little bit. So that that was I think an important finding because it does show that this butting, even if we're using pain management, does affect the kid, right? And and affects the kids' behavior, which we can use as a proxy sort of for how they're feeling, right? You know, one of the reasons that we did do the behavior and the physiology in this study is because I think it's it's per I think it's important to show kind of the full picture of what these kids are experiencing. Because one without the other, you know, we can say things about it, but this kind of paints the whole picture. And so the the other thing we saw is that we saw that the kids that were in the day, so the day after disbutting, that you know, kids lay down more and they lay down more with the con with the with the buddy. So we we uh talked we describes laying down alone, so or laying down socially. So if they were in contact with another goat kid, which you know is very typical goat behavior, and we we found that they they were they lay down more um also on that day of disbudding. So they're just more uh more restful and less playful, showing that that really is the the procedure itself is really impacting kind of how they're feeling.
Sarah:Were the sham kids laying down more just from being handled so much more and being tired?
Whitney:Yeah. I think so. So it was it was honestly a it's a pretty all the kids were stressed equally, but it was a pretty stressful thing for them. Right. You know, and it a little different than you would expect you would be doing on farm, right? Because you're probably pulling the kids out of a jug or a pen, disbutting them and then putting them right back in, right? Right. We we did it in a different room, and so yeah, and and that is probably why we saw that difference over all the kids on the sham kids as well, just because it was, you know, a stressful event for them, even though they weren't disbudded, they were handled exactly the same. Um, so we didn't have a group that we didn't touch. So I would expect those kids to be a little different. But the other really interesting thing that sometimes happens is it's called negative play contagion, which is a fancy way to say that like if the like mood in a group of animals or the the playfulness in a group of animals is decreased, like based on a treatment, for example, the kids or the sheep or the calves that aren't undergoing that treatment, their their behavior also changes and usually decreases. So that could be too that because other kids weren't playing, they also were not playing. Because there was only we only had one kid per treatment group in each group of animals. So we had, you know, there was one sham kid and one kid from every treatment group in a pen of animals that we were evaluating.
Sarah:Okay. There was wasn't there a significant thing that maloxicam had in play in this part, or just right after?
Whitney:So the mechanical no-susceptive threshold testing, there was a difference in maloxicam. And so what that is a fancy again, a fancy term for saying pain sensitivity. And so we found that overall, and we did that I think for 24 and 48 hours after disbudding, we found that the kids, the kids that only had meloxicam were overall more sensitive, more sensitive, more sensitive, yeah, exactly. So it there, I I don't like to to talk about MNT mechanical no-susceptive threshold testing, measuring pain. That's how a lot of people talk about it. I like to talk about it measuring sensitivity, um, but but the the extrapolation there is that those kids hurt more because what we do is we apply it's essentially like a pressure sensor, and we we put it on their head pretty slowly, and then as soon as they move, that is when we stop, and then we measured like the amount of force that was applied before they moved their head. It's very challenging to do in goat kids because when you come at goat kids, you know, from the front, they like flip their head up and they're looking at you, and it's a challenging thing to do. But again, what that's telling us is that that meloxicam group were just overall more sensitive and potentially more painful as compared to all the other groups and were statistically different than that sham group, which was had a higher mechanical no-susceptive threshold, which means that they were less sensitive.
Sarah:Okay.
Whitney:That's weird. Yeah, it is weird. I don't know why it happened. You know, the the it's it's and you know, maybe if we would have given them maloxicam multiple days, but it's it's possible that doing it, you know, 20 minutes prior is just not enough.
Sarah:Yeah. Hmm. Interesting, interesting. I'd be interested also to see maloxicam versus banamine.
Whitney:Yeah. So there has been some work with with with flunixin, and it seems prompt, you know, it's sometimes paired with latochine in goat kids. There's a few studies that look at that, mostly that are looking at behavior. I think another interesting thing is look is trans is the transdermal banamine, right? So that's eat that's really easy to apply. And so I think that there's other things that need to be looked at. So like the multi-day malox scan, the multi-day transdermal banamine. I think that that are other things that we could potentially look at which could mitigate some of that inflammatory response that we see postcottery and help improve um how goat kids are feeling after that after that procedure.
Sarah:Our April Bozin bleats was about Dr. Joe Smith's study on giving banamine sub Q. And he talked a little bit about the transdermal, and he said, unfortunately in goats it's only like 25% effective level. That's not the right term, but so I'm not sure that's gonna be the next big thing in goats, but being able to hopefully get it labeled for sub Q would make it easier for everyone to as a potential. So, and unfortunately, even though all my equine clients want to give it orally, that's not really a thing either. Okay, well, do you feel like we have talked about all the things on this paper that you feel like the world needs to know? Sure, I think so. Yeah, this paper is so interesting. You know, it's not exactly what I kind of expected, which is how science works, right? And you could redo this exact study the exact same way and potentially see a few little different things. You know, I hope everybody at least takes away that please do something, you know, update them, do lidocaine, even if you just do meloxicam, you know, before and after, a couple days after, you know, I think there's there's no reason not to, for sure. All right, so moving on, I have a final question that I'm sure you read that I like to ask everybody. What do you see as the next problem that researchers need to think about and address in small ruminant medicine? So your own research, other people's research, shoot for the stars. What do we need to do?
Whitney:That's why I've been pondering this because I for me, I mean, we're still working on disbudding. So we're still we we actually did a large um on-farm trial looking at some the xylozine watch game and lidocaine combination that hopefully will be out at some point. But we have, you know, things in the works, hopefully to look at more in-depth this question about um the local block, looking at some different locals, some of the longer acting local anesthetics to see um, you know, looking at like we talked about, looking at the difference between, you know, giving multi-day non-steroidals, looking at caustic paste. So for me, it's just budding. And I also I'm a I'm a like young stock junkie. And so I think another area that is wide open is colostrum, colostrum management, um, failure of passive transfer in goat kids, what are the what are the cut points? How do we measure it? How do we measure it? So those are those are the things that I'm really excited about for interested in as I move forward as a researcher. So, you know, I'm sure there's a myriad of other things that are that are important for our small remnants and for our clients and and for promoting their welfare.
Sarah:So yeah, almost everybody I've asked that question is also expressed how there's no funding.
Whitney:Yeah, and yeah, and I will say unfortunately, so USDA this year, they only funded 16% of the submissions. Last year or in the last cycle, it was 50%. So all of us were like super hopeful. But but there are, I think, one of the one of the good things is that um, particularly for pain management, um, there is interest in solving some of these questions. But absolutely the challenge is that you know, our sheep and goats, as much as we love them, they are minor species. And so they do, they do get the the short end of the stick sometimes when it comes to funding.
Sarah:Yeah, yeah, that's rough. Well, I appreciate you so much for going over this paper with us, and I will put in the notes how to get a hold of you if that's okay, if anybody has any questions and how where people can find this paper. And yes, thank you so much for joining us with Boz and Bleats today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
