Effects of local anesthetic or systemic analgesia on pain associated with cautery disbudding in calves

A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Disbudding is a common management procedure performed on dairy farms and, when done without pain mitigation, is viewed as a key welfare issue. Use of pain control has increased in recent years, but full adoption of anesthesia and analgesia by veterinarians or dairy producers has not been achieved. Part of the gap between primary research and application in the dairy industry may be driven by the lack of a consistent set of recommendations from primary research papers. Likewise, narrative reviews typically do not include evidence-based methods to identify, assess, and synthesize results; as a result, conclusions may suffer from bias. Conversely, properly conducted systematic reviews offer a more robust and transparent methodology to identify, evaluate, and summarize evidence on a given topic. Meta-analysis also allow for synthesis of overall effects as well as identification and exploration of causes of heterogeneity among studies, possibly identifying sources of variability that may be further examined or used to guide inferences of the robustness of the observed effects across different study designs or settings. The objective of this systematic review was to examine the effects of these pain control practices for the most common method of disbudding (cautery) on outcomes associated with disbudding pain in calves.