Why Are You So Lame? Analyzing Lameness in Cattle

Cattle get lame for a lot of reasons, including injury, poor conformation, grain overload, mycotoxins (e.g., ergot) and bacterial infection. Different types of lameness need to be treated differently. Antibiotic treatment only helps if a bacterial infection is involved. Lameness is the second leading reason (behind bovine respiratory disease) that feedlot cattle are pulled and given antibiotics. Lame cattle eat less, grow more slowly and less efficiently, may be shipped early and often don’t grade as well. These add up to a significant economic cost. When cattle get lame late in the feeding period, pre-slaughter withdrawal times limit the number of antibiotic treatment options. A team of Canadian researchers led by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Karen Schwartzkopf-Genswein recently published a review of large-scale studies of foot-related lameness in feedlot cattle (A Review of Foot Related Lameness in Feedlot Cattle; What They Did These researchers reviewed studies of infectiou