The Role of the bull in dystocia

Abstract

It is always somewhat surprising that members of a profession who spend almost eighty per cent of their lifetime at the back end of the cows they treat, do not always have the back-up information on the problem of dystocia. While we are all in our own way expert in reproduction, practitioners in particular have the expertise to extract calves from extremely difficult situations, I am fairly sure that we do not know, for example, the exact level of economic loss that dystocia causes to the farming community.

I am sure that we can all hazard guesses based on calf losses, but do we really know what the financial implications are in loss of yield, problems associated with retained placenta, infertility following a difficult calving, problems associated with the health of calves born as a result of difficult calvings and so on.

We do know of course that farmers use bulls such as Aberdeen Angus or Sussex on maiden Friesian heifers in order to ease the calving problems. This in itself can result in some fairly severe financial losses because of the difference in value, for arguments sake, between a cross-bred Aberdeen Angus calf and a cross-bred Hereford calf from the same dams. Workers overseas have tried to put figures to this particular problem, but of course their conditions are somewhat different from our own, and are obviously not strictly comparable.