Managing for Profit

Merck unveils Creating Connections to improve cattle handling

To identify what stresses cattle, it’s important to understand as much as possible about the animal. Dr. Rick Sibbel is director of U.S. cattle technical services for Merck Animal Health and says cattle are a prey species.

“We domesticated cattle a long time ago of course.  So as a result, they try and hide the weakest in the group.  But more importantly, that means that when you are trying to move cattle, you have to keep in their line-of-sight.”

He tells Brownfield there are certain places you need to be while working cattle and it’s refreshing to see the effectiveness when compared to using whips, noise machines or other ways that were once thought of as necessary to moving cattle. Sibbel says once the animal is moved, it will look to sort out a few things.

“Things like: ‘where is the water?  Where is it safe for me to stand away from the rest of the group?’  If cattle are being moved into a pen and there’s more than one group coming together, they’ve got a pecking order and this sort of communication between the animals that would have to go on.  So all those things sort of add up to dimensions on anxiety.”

Merck Animal Health has taken this knowledge to create a tool for producers called Creating Connections.

“It’s about understanding how to move cattle with the least amount of anxiety (to the animal) possible.  It is a program that has multiple modules.  It’s to try and help the cattle industry to understand, we can move cattle from point A to point B; and we can do it in a way that the cattle are willing, and they’re not stressed.”

Sibbel says the program allows for on-site training if necessary.

“At the producer’s operation by trained professionals that work with the owner of the cattle and their employees.  So there’s all those steps in between.  So (start with) online to look at the training, all the way to real-life cattle handling.”

And Sibbel says consumers care about the issue of livestock handling.

“(To know that) we cattlemen are doing everything everyday that treats the animals with respect and takes care of the welfare of the animals.  The story that allows us to communicate with the consumer about these kinds of cattle handling techniques is nothing short of extraordinary.”

To learn more about the program, go to creatingconnections.info.