 I'm Dr. Charlie Stoltenall. I'm the Extension Veterinarian here at NDSU, located in Fargo. John asked me today to talk a little bit about calf health. What can we do to help these little guys once they hit the ground? What can we do to chime off and get them going? What are some other programs that we can do now that ensure that they get off to a fast start? We'll try and answer some of those questions and start a little dialogue. Thanks for stopping by today. Have a look around. Take care. The single greatest cause of calf death is dystocia or that difficult birth. It can't be said enough that we really have to take care of what we do before these calves even get to the ground. A case in point is you don't want to wait when you're having a difficult birth out there. Don't wait too long. Get help. This website below is an interview done by a Bismarck station when Bob Mortimer from Colorado State was up here in December for our calving school or dystocia school. He's got some really good points to offer us. So if you can, click on that and listen to that. The biggest loss of calf health or loss of death is actually dystocia. Cubs are pretty resilient, but they do need some help. And where we start off is the environment. Where we calve out these calves, we need to keep it clean or we have to have it set up so that the minimal contamination or bedding is left. I'm just a stickler that sick animals do not belong in a calving environment. Calving is stressful enough and we really don't need to be putting sick animals back in that environment. Also remember, older calves infect younger calves. We've got calves out there that might be two, three weeks old and they might be healthy themselves, but they're going to be spreading all different types of pathogens. And so I really recommend that you need to look at your calving operations and use what I call convalescent pens for sick animals. Any animal that gets sick and they're damn, if they get sick, we put them in a treatment area, not the calving area. We get them well and then we put them in an area what we call convalescent. And they might be well and they stay there. We do not want to take these animals that were once sick, put them back into the general population. That's where we get scours outbreaks. I know. It means that we have to have a lot more pens in maybe geographical areas where we keep these animals, but that's how we keep our animals from getting sick. We have to practice better biosecurity. Well, you'll probably ask them, Doc, when can I put them back together? The rule of thumb is when it's bright sunshine and you're going to kick them back out on the pasture, that's when you can combing them. We need to use the sun, the heat, the warm weather to get rid of these pathogens. So my view is we never want to put a sick animal into the calving area. We really don't want to put sick animals back in with our general population. It just leads to problems later on. Again, to stress, when we have calves hitting the ground out there, depending on what time of the year you're doing it, but if you're in the early part of the year, February, March, calves need bedding. They need bedding or a dry place. They need to be able to get out of the wind. And so shelters, open-faced calving or pole bonds are good. And above all, I shouldn't say above all else, but another really important consideration is calving areas and where these calves need drainage. I've been called out to too many farms to look at them, and the calving area is actually situated below a backgrounding lot or a feed lot or where we have older animals and the runoff is running right through the calving pen, the calving areas. This is a big mistake because all that runoff is going to have some type of pathogen in it and these calves are really susceptible. So we really need to think about what we're doing out there. How do I have it designed? Where is the drainage going? Because the last thing we need to do is offer these newborn calves contaminated area. So once the calf is out of the animal, hopefully we didn't have to pull it, we're there. We watch things go on normally. Then what do we do? One of the things we can do is we can remove any mucus from the calf's mouth and nose with a clean finger. There's another area. Optimistic producers out there, they don't really take the time to wash their hands. Take the time. A little cleanliness on your part goes a long ways. Wash your hands, be clean. You don't need to do any other Herculean events. Some producers out there know that they'll hang calves upside down because all this food comes out. That's just food out of a calf's stomach. All we're doing is stressing that animal out. How would you like someone to hang you by your ankles and see how well you breathe and swing you around in the air? That's not helping. So the practice of hanging calves upside down doesn't really help us in this area. If we have a calf that we don't think is breathing like it should, we can use a clean straw or a clean soft pervertube that's typically inside the nose. What they'll try and do is exhale, try and blow that out and that can help stimulate the breathing. Another way is to rub the calf vigorously with a warm towel or towel. Try and get them dried off. Rub them, get them gone so they can breathe. And if the cow or calf wants to take that calf's letter, that's the best stimulation that calf can have because if it's damp, it starts licking on it. Another area I'm often asked about is, what about doing even an artificial respirator out there for these calves? I don't know how to answer that question. In large herds, it might be beneficial depending on how many you have, but really the cause of calves that aren't breathing is that they've been in there inside the dam too long so they're starting to get asphyxiated. And so it's important that we do get air to them. If you're going to do this and have an artificial respirator around, be prepared, get one ahead of time. There are commercial respirators, resuscitators available. One of the things you have to be aware of when you use one of these is you have to hold off the esophagus to prevent air from filling the room under the stomach. Now, the following, I'm going to show you some pictures of a commercial type of resuscitator out there. And I'll try and explain how to do that. Here's a picture of a resuscitator that's on the market out there or there are others like this. It has a plastic portion, and that's just an expandable tube to be able to pump air, and then it has a clear little nose cone that fits over the mouth and nose of the calf. And these can be reused. They should be cleaned up and kept in a clean area and all those things, but they can be reused. So here we place the resuscitator over the calf's nose, notice how it's placed, and we just, what we'll do is we'll pull that plunger out and you'll see it in its fully extended position in the next slide, and then we'll just push that air into the lungs of that calf. Here's a picture with that tube fully extended. So what it's done is it's pulled that volume of air into the plunger. And so now next, what we're going to do is push that plunger in and that air will be forced into the nose, the neres, and the mouth of the calf. But before you do that, there's one important thing you have to do, and this is on the next slide. Notice where his hand is. Actually it'd be his left hand. It's over on the calf's neck, and notice the calf is down on its right side. And what he's done is he's pushing down on that esophagus, trying to pinch that off there. So when he pushes that air in with the plunger, he doesn't feel the ruin or the stomach full of air. So that air that's pushed in actually goes down the trachea into the lungs. This is not hard to do, but you have to be aware of this. Otherwise you'll spend all your time inflating the rumin and wondering why the calf still keeps turning blue.