Acute cortisol responses and wound healing in lambs after ring castration plus docking with or without application of a castration clamp to the scrotum.

Acute castration and/or tailing distress and its alleviation in lambs.

UNLABELLED PURPOSES AND APPROACH: Acute castration and/or tailing distress in lambs has been examined extensively during the last decade. At least 59 different approaches to assessing and alleviating this distress have been reported so that the literature is quite complex. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the literature on castration and/or tailing distress, where the dist...

2005 MLA Sheep Prize Winner

Routine husbandry procedures, such as castration and tail docking, are known to induce pain and distress in lambs (Grant, 2004; Kent et al., 2001). This raises important welfare concerns and has attracted debate on the acceptability of such practices. The most common method of castration and tail docking involves the application of a rubber ring to the scrotum or tail, usually without anesthesi...

PART IV: WELFARE IMPLICATIONS OF CURRENT METHODS OF CASTRATION AND TAIL DOCKING Castration by elastration (the rubber ring method) Short scrotum castration Immunocastration Surgical castration Clamp (bloodless) castration

A sex difference in the cortisol response to tail docking and ACTH develops between 1 and 8 weeks of age in lambs.

It is important to understand factors that may influence responses to stress, as these factors may also influence vulnerability to pathologies that can develop when stress responses are excessive or prolonged. It is clear that, in adults, the sex of an individual can influence the cortisol response to stress in a stressor specific manner. Nevertheless, the stage of development at which these se...

The effect of topical anti-infective application at castration and tail docking of baby pigs versus doing nothing

Introduction Recent studies published in the US1 and in Canada2 have attempted to show that baby pigs do experience pain at castration. Identification or even quantification of pain is measured in vocalization, serum chemical analysis and behavior. Neither vocalization nor chemical analyses have been consistently successful in separating castrated pigs from sham castrated (held the same except ...