LAUSR

FARM vets can recommend that sheep farmers stop routine foot trimming to treat lameness in their flocks. Instead, they should treat cases of footrot, the major cause of lameness, with an injectable antibiotic and a topical spray within three days of the sheep becoming lame. Researchers at the University of Warwick have found that foot trimming is not an effective treatment. They carried out a study of 53 lame sheep on a commercial sheep farm in England and administered four different treatments to investigate which would be the most effective after five days of treatment. Injection of an antibiotic in combination with a topical spray was found to reduce lameness by 70 per cent after five days of treatment, whereas the traditional method of foot trimming and using a topical spray only reduced lameness by 10 per cent. Lameness in sheep is most commonly a result of footrot, a bacterial infection caused by Dichelobacter nodosus. Traditionally, farmers have treated the condition through routine foot trimming of the infected tissue and the application of a topical spray to the feet, a long-standing farm procedure since the 1980s. However, the research team at Warwick found that foot trimming could actually cause lameness. This is because trimming can result in the horn being removed too far, and in some cases as far up as the coronary band, exposing sensitive tissue that is painful for the sheep to walk on and is vulnerable to reinfection. Speaking at the Animal Welfare Foundation discussion forum in London earlier this week, Laura Green said: ‘If we treat sheep within three days of becoming lame then not only do they recover without any reduction in productivity but also, because lameness is caused by an infectious bacterial disease, this rapid treatment prevents onward transmission of disease’. She added that use of an antibiotic injection for treatment of lameness at a time when efforts are being made to reduce the use of antibiotics might be seen as conflicting advice, but that this highly effective, targeted treatment would actually help farmers to use less antibiotics in the long term, due to the reduction in ongoing transmission and spread of disease through the flock. Fiona Lovatt, a sheep vet and founder of Flock Health, said: ‘We have actually been advising farmers to adopt this treatment plan for the past couple of years, but because of the way the sheep industry works, it is still new to a lot of farmers’. The key message that needs to be conveyed to farmers is that ‘as it is an infectious bacterial disease, if you have a clinical case you should treat it effectively and quickly with an injectable antibiotic, and that helps to stop the disease spread because they are not infecting other animals’. This new advice aims to help the sheep industry meet the 2021 targets of having a lameness prevalence of under 2 per cent in the UK, as set by the Farm Animal Welfare Committee. Dr Lovatt added: ‘I would advise farmers not to routine foot trim. In the case of the lame sheep the important message is to treat the infection effectively and foot trimming is not a treatment – it is a cosmetic procedure’.