Why the study?
Animals experiencing painful procedures as neonates are more sensitive to pain later in life, prompting evaluation of how disbudding age affects subsequent pain responses.
Does the age of early burn injury (disbudding) affect sensitivity to future painful stimuli in dairy heifers?
Does the age of early burn injury (disbudding) affect sensitivity to future painful stimuli in dairy heifers?
Disbudding age in dairy heifers influences autonomic nervous system activity later in life, with earlier disbudding potentially increasing sensitivity to future painful stimuli.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
May heighten later pain sensitivity in dairy heifers; hypothesis-generating for disbudding age, needs prospective validation.
Animals that experience painful procedures as neonates are more sensitive to pain later in life. We evaluated whether disbudding with a heated iron at 3 (n = 12), 35 (n = 9), or 56 (n = 20) d of age affected heifers' pain responses to vaccine injections at 11 mo of age. Heifers responded to the injection procedure with struggling and changes in eye temperature and heart rate variability compared to a sham procedure the day before, and still had a heightened response 6 d later, regardless of disbudding age. However, some heart rate variability indices suggested increased sympathetic dominance in heifers disbudded at 35 d, compared to the other 2 age groups, independent of the injection procedure. We also found that heifers disbudded at 3 or 35 d had a higher mean heart rate after the injection procedure compared to those disbudded at 56 d. We conclude that: (1) heifers find injections aversive; and (2) there is some evidence that disbudding age influences autonomic nervous system activity later in life.
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Adcock et al. (2020) studied this question.
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