Assessing the Standard of Health and Welfare in Individual Categories of Cattle from the Viewpoint of Intravital Pathological Changes

Abstract

The standard of the health and welfare of individual categories of cattle was assessed from the viewpoint of intravital pathological changes. The results of veterinary inspections of 2,514,666 head of cattle (1,136,754 cows, 257,912 heifers, 1,015,541 bulls and 104,459 calves) slaughtered in the Czech Republic in the period from 2010 to 2019 were analyzed. The results show significant differences (p < 0.01) between the categories of cattle in the total numbers of intravital findings. Intravital findings were most frequently recorded in cows (index 2.271) and least frequently recorded in bulls (index 0.479). In all categories of cattle, chronic findings predominated, where the largest number was recorded in cows (index 1.740) and calves (index 0.910). Parasitic and traumatic findings were only detected in low numbers in all categories of cattle. Assessment of the trend in the total number of intravital pathological findings in individual categories of cattle in the monitored period showed an evident fall in heifers (rSp = −0.915, p < 0.01), cows (rSp = −0.806, p < 0.01) and bulls (rSp = −0.636, p < 0.05). In calves, no decreasing trend was found (rSp = −0.382, p > 0.05). The results obtained in this study do not merely reflect the standard of health of the animals slaughtered at abattoirs in the Czech Republic, but also provide a picture of the standard of the living conditions provided by farmers rearing individual categories of cattle.

Health status of slaughtered animals as indicated by postmortem inspection at slaughterhouses

“…Most of the existing studies that deal with causes of the condemnation of carcasses or the pathoanatomical findings identified during postmortem veterinary inspection at a slaughterhouse in general focus on a specific species of livestock, such as cattle (Tabaran et al 2018;Kaluža et al 2020Kaluža et al , 2021, pigs (Hansson et al 2000;Kongsted and Sorensen 2017;Večerek et al 2020a,b), rabbits (Drozd et al 2019;Válková et al 2021), broiler chickens (Jakob et al 1998;Ferreira et al 2012;Amini et al 2015;Buzdugan et al 2020), laying hens (Keutgen et al 1999), turkeys (Lupo et al 2010) or ostriches (Dzoma et al 2009). Due to the differences in the focus of the studies, the methodology for evaluating the findings, the duration and extent of the monitoring (often data from only one or a few slaughterhouses), the inter-species comparison of the frequency of PA findings is difficult.…”