Handling Crisis with your Livestock
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EmailMarch 3, 2025
Sometimes accidents and life happens, and your animals go down. What do you do when this happens? How can you prepare for this type of crisis? This webinar explains how to handle down livestock - including cattle, sheep and goats, pigs, and horses- and how to best humanely handle this situration.
The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/.
Video Transcript
So good evening. Welcome to the MI Ag Ideas to Grow With virtual conference. My name is Paola Bacigalupo Sanguesa and I am a dairy educator based out of Ingham County. With me are my colleagues, Mike Metzger. There moving the camera, saying hi, who is a small ruminant educator and Beth Ferry, who is a swine educator and both of them have statewide coverage. So if you need anything from them, just go ahead and contact them and the same for me. I have other colleagues around the state, but we'll make sure that we help you if you need anything. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the session handling crisis with livestock. Um, Before we start, let me see if this works. We would like to take a quick moment to thank our sponsor, Agri Strategies, LLC. Due to their support, we're able to offer this event at no charge to participants and also provide the recordings of all the other sessions. And, um, We have a very holistic approach to help farms in Extension, and this also includes providing support for farm stress. If you want to learn more about the MSU Extension Farm Stress Program and all the resources they have, please visit their website. There here at the bottom is the link, or you can use this QR code to get to their website. With that, now let's jump into this session. Our session, like I said, it's called handling crisis with your livestock. What is a crisis? If you look at your dictionary, a crisis is an event that's an unstable and dangerous situation affecting a single individual, a group, or a community. In this case, we'll be talking about something that affects one individual, but it has an effect on the entire farm that you can call a community. On farms, what are some examples of crisis. One of them is not having access to water. This is a crisis in so many levels. I've been there and it is not fun. Another type of crisis would be a barnfire. Thankfully, I haven't lived through one of those, but I'm sure that a lot of people here in Michigan have and a down animal is also a crisis and that's where we'll be focusing today. So what is a down animal. Down animal is an animal that cannot move, so we call them non ambulatory or downer. These are animals that are unstable. They cannot, unable to stand or walk on its own. They can sometimes they can stand, but they're very wobbly. If they take one step, they fall to the ground, those are all under, uh considered a down animal, and they can end up in lost profit, due to the decreased production that they will have after this, uh, event of being down and sometimes euthanasia is the only way we can um prevent this animal from suffering. But no matter what the species or what causes, it's always an animal welfare issue, so we have to be able to identify them quickly and act fast because these are emergencies. Again, no matter the species, down animal is an emergency and we need to react quickly for getting a best chance of survival of the animals and minimize the loss in production. So we'll be focusing on cattle, so that's what we're going to start with. I'll be talking about non ambulatory or downed cattle. There are multiple causes that can make an animal to go down or not being able to move. For dairy cattle, number one is milk fever and difficult calving. So um, milk fever usually, if I can give a number, it would be 99% of the time will happen in fresh animals, but it has been reported during the, later in the lactation too. Difficult calving includes severe fractures due to hard traction, joint dislocation, nerve damage, and also some internal damage on the birth canal. Sometimes the pain is so big that it can make an animal to go down. Another cause could be Poor foot traction of the area where the animal is, any falls or slips, severe mastitis, and also some other acute presentations of other diseases can make an animal to be down, as well as metabolic diseases, and also not enough lunge space so the animal cannot get up because they have a physical obstruction in the lunge space. So when we have an animal that is down or we suspect that animal is down, we need to start with an initial assessment. So this is where we get to be, uh, kind of investigators, a detective. What is wrong with this down animal? One of the questions that we have to ask ourselves is, is the cow upright, alert, and responsive. That can indicate is where the thing is going. Cows, for example, cows that have fractures, they are very right, very alert, very responsive. They're in pain, so sometimes they're going to be fighty. But you know that their mental state is okay. Well, in advanced cases of other metabolic diseases or milk fever, they can be more depressed and not reactive. Another question is, are there any barriers that prevent these animals from standing? Is the easiest thing to solve? Sometimes it's not, but at least it's not related to the health of the cow. Could the cow have slipped or fall? We need to look at the floor, where they're standing, where are they down? Where are they in their lactation and when did she calve? That will tell us if they're a fresh cow and also if we keep track of the If we keep track of if they got help during the calving, that will give us a lot of information. I don't know if you were in Cora's, my colleague session that was started at six, she did an amazing job talking about calving, how to treat it, and, like, It was a great session. So if you were not there, I highly recommend you watch that recording that will be available in a few weeks. How old is the animal that will give us also risk factors for milk fever or for other diseases? Is she in heat? Could she have fall because she was mounted and also is she sick? Is there any disease affecting this animal? As a general treatment, we want to move this animal to an area that is dry, soft. You wouldn't expect an animal to recover very well if we leave them on concrete. We need to provide something soft, something that is comfortable. If there's no way, you cannot move, you can move that animal, you need to provide enough bedding to cover the hard surface, in case they're on concrete. We also want to provide an area that has good footing so when they're ready to try to get up, they can do it and they won't slip, and also some protection from the weather. For example, for a day like today that is not very cold, an animal that is down in the pasture, Yeah, they might have been okay for a few hours today, but now it's raining and it's going to get really cold. That's not going to help them with their recovery. The same if its a day with 90 degrees here in Michigan, with the humidity, the sunshine on top of those animals, that is not what we want. We need to make sure that the animal is comfortable and protected. We need to also ensure that the cows on their sternum so that they are laying all their weight on the front of the ribs or sitting upright. I'll show you a picture of how we don't want them to be laying down later. I also explain why this is so important later. We want to roll them over every four to 6 hours, that's ideally, but at a minimum, we need to roll them over twice a day. This is extremely important for the recovery too. Of course, we want them to have access to fresh water and feed. Some of these animals are going to be off feed and of water, but when they're ready when they're starting to feel better, they have to have easy access to this. It's not good if an animal is down and the water and the feed is six feet away from them. It has to be within their reach and fresh and clean. Of course, to provide treatments for their specific cause of what made this animal go down following your farm protocols. So this is an animal that is not on sternum. This is not sitting upright, it's laying on its side, on lateral the cubedum and this is what we do not want. Why? Because here all the organs that are on the right side of this particular animal are getting all the pressure from the ones that are on the left side. Specifically for ruminants, this is a really, really bad thing, So this is something that we need to avoid. So, you can see that this animal was trying to get up but couldn't or was trying to move making some effort to move their legs, but they couldn't get up. So this is something that we need to correct and sometimes you're going to have to correct it ten times a day. It takes time, but that will make a big difference in the recovery of your animal. So how do we move the animals? Let's imagine the animal fell down in a very trafficked area or a hard concrete and it's not where you have them. You usually have two options to move cattle. One of them is using a skid steer. For this, you will need three people. You will need one halter and at least two ropes and depending on the bucket that you have, you need some protection to put on top of the bolts in the bucket. So what I mean is these bolts here, they don't look that big, but they can do a lot of damage. And this is an absolutely no when it comes to put animals there. So, uh, big dairy farms that have a high incidence of down animals, they have a designated bucket just for down animals where they remove this bolts and then you don't have to think about protecting them. But if that's not your case, you can put a big piece of rubber, multiple pieces of cardboard, something there to protect the cow because this will make damage, and this is not acceptable to use a bucket like this without covering the bolts. As a very simple steps, that it's a lot simpler to say it than to actually do it when using a skid steer. You want to put the bucket as close as you can to the cow and with a little tilt and very skilled people can do it, but you need to be very careful that not pinching the skin. When you're getting the bucket close, you're going to have the cow tied with a halter and the head is going to be tied to one of the rear legs, and then you're going to roll the cow into the bucket using ropes and human strength. Then slowly the bucket has to be lifted and then slowly the skid steer with the two extra people on their side are going to be moving the cow to the designated area. What you should never ever do is to try to scoop up the cow with the bucket. I am sure that a lot of people can do. They can do it with various skilled operators can do wonderful things with these buckets. But when it comes to live animal, this is an absolute no. We cannot do that and it's not acceptable. And for the use of the skid steers and the sled that I'm going to be talking about a little bit later, I highly recommend that you take a look to the Merck's Dairy Care 365 online training. It's for free. You just need an email to create an account and you have access to great information. Due to the sensitive sensitivity of how sensitible these images are, there's nothing online other than this, and they have animations to show all this process. So if you get a chance, if you want to get better at this and learn more, I recommend this training. Now for the slides, we need three people. We need a halter too and at least two extra ropes. Again, we're going to tie that halter to the rear leg. We're going to roll or move the cow onto the sled by using the ropes and we're going to ensure that there's no limbs hanging off the sled, so everything is contained inside the sled. Then slowly, the tractor or skid is going to pull that sled. Okay. So how do we want the cow? What I mean with the halter and the head pointing to the leg? This is it. This is an easy way to neutralize the cow and they don't move once we have there. You can tie a easy release, easy release knot, or you can just hold this it's more recommended that you have a knot if you're putting them, I mean, if you're going to put them in a bucket 100%, you need a knot there. And here we have a video of a sled that is actually used on one of the MSU farms, homemade sled. We don't have an adult cattle because we don't have an adult size model. This is just a model of a calf. We did our best trying to do the head and towards the legs, halter rope and now we're giving instructions to the operator. We're tying the chains to the bucket. And then the animal that is immobilized, we're tying those ropes to the base of the slide. Then once secure, we're giving the signal to the operator of the skid and slowly we are moving with the skid steer at a very slow speed, making sure the animal is okay. This is one of the correct ways to do it. This seems easier to me at least that I am not good with skid steers. This is a better option on how to move animals. So I mentioned that we need to roll over the animals frequently, at least twice a day, but every 4 hours ideally. And why is this so important is because A to cattle weighs 900-1700 pounds. This is a lot of weight. If you observe animals, they can be laying down for a long time, but they're always changing position just as we are. We're never very still. Putting pressure on our joints or if we sit down, if we're very focused on something and we have a leg that is bend and suddenly we have all those ants in our legs, not a good safe sessia What happened to cattle that are not roll up frequently is that to a bigger very big magnitude. They do get some secondary damage from the pressure of their own weight and that's going to happen on the muscles, mainly on the muscles of their hind legs, but also on the nerves on the fore and the hind leg. And this is just can be prevented by rolling over the animals from one side to the other one. I'm not going to go into how to use the rope for that, but it's not difficult and must be done when we have these animals if we want to avoid this condition to get worse. So here I have a picture of an animal that had some muscle damage and now they have a swelling here in the back. And this is just because this animal, for whatever reason that it wasn't explained in the book, couldn't be rolled over or was not rollover after it went down. Ideally, too, we want to promote standing, but this is sometimes easier said than done. I think it's always easier said than done. We would like to do this once daily to try to relieve some pressure on the rear limbs of the cow. This brings a lot of relief to the animals, but like I said, it's difficult. We can do this with the use of ling. If you, here you can see this sling that goes on the chest area from left to right, but also goes in between the front legs and it also has some belts that go where I try to put some red lines here. That's very important so it doesn't move. Doing this for 20 minutes, once a day or 30 minutes would benefit the cow, but they're easy to put on, I mean hard to put on, hard to remove in some of the animals, but it has a lot of if you can do it, it's highly recommended. Now, some farms would use hip clamps to promote standing and their use is very controversial. Hip clamps have been brought a lot of negative press to the dairy and dairy industry in particular, but to all animal agriculture. Additionally, they should only be used by experienced people and very skilled operators and not more than once a day. Hip clamps sometimes We think we're making something good, but they're actually making more damage than good. For multiple reasons, we want to try to stay away from the hip clamps. If you're going to use them only use them to promote standing, never, ever to move a cow from one place to the other, even if it's six feet, that is a no. So one of recommendation is to have a down cow box. This is just to save time. It's ready to go in case you have a down cow, because we need to act faster. In this box, you can include halter, ropes, some tools to disassemble free stalls, and treatment for milk fever, these last two more relevant for dairy farms. So how do we prevent this Down cow is with assisting in calving if they're having difficulties, and if we're going to do it, do it properly. No use of extreme force, always use lubricant and all the good things that you can learn from the previous session, as I mentioned, keep always a close eyes on your fresh cows, try to use non slip floors and use of proper management, proper stockmanship, This is very important when we're moving animals, so we don't stress them. We don't make them move faster than what they should be. And we always want to make them, allow them to walk at their own pace and not force running. Some of the best practices or if you can do one thing after the session is to have a designated area for the down cows, start to create a plan to move your down cows according to the tools and equipment that you have on your own farm, develop protocols for potential causes, you know what to do depending on what is affecting the animal, and also consider euthanasia for animals that are not responding to the treatment. In all this, your veterinarian can be a great assessment, uh addition to all this conversation. Try to include your veterinarian when planning for down cows. With this, I will leave, pass the mic now to Beth that will be sharing a little bit about non-ambulatory or down pigs. Hello, everyone, and thank you, Paola, for that wonderful discussion regarding dairy cattle. We're going to go ahead and jump into some information about non ambulatory pigs or downed pigs and just review some things really quickly. There is a little bit of difference between pigs and cattle, which is why we wanted to touch on this today. Fortunately for pigs, we actually have a definition of what is non ambulatory or a downed pig. And that's a pig that cannot get up or can stand with support and is unable to bear weight on two of its legs. That's considered a non ambulatory pig. If they can't bear weight on two legs or cannot stand up, that's non ambulatory. Versus pig who just can't bear weight on one leg, we actually consider that severely lame. There's a difference there. One big thing to note is that any animal, any pig that is unable to walk or that is ill or injured and will not recover needs to be humanely euthanized on the farm. Sometimes, unfortunately, we do see some of those animals being loaded onto trucks and sent to market chains when they can't walk. And that's a problem in the industry and one that we need to address. We want to make sure that if an animal is ill, injured and not able to recover, we're not sending those on trucks to market chains. You can go ahead and euthanize them on the farm. You may be able to do some at home butchering, something like that or have someone come to your place to assist you with that. We just want to make sure that we're not trying to transport those animals. Next slide, please. As we talk about non ambulatory pigs, there's a lot of different reasons that they may have that limited or no mobility. A lot of times it's a result of a neurological issue or a skeletal issue. Um, and it's a major cause of euthanasia in pigs. For pigs, it's really hard to reverse once they are actually down and non ambulatory. This, of course, leads to those economic losses and animal welfare concerns as to how well we're managing those pigs. A lot of times it can be very challenging to diagnose what the exact cause of the root of the problem really is. The best thing to do is get to them before they get to this point. Daily walks, daily observation of our animals, checking on them to see that they're moving, that they're standing, that they're not lame. All of those things are really good production practices, so we don't actually get to this point. But it's also really important to understand what we can do when we get to this point. We have those non ambulatory pigs. Next slide, please. So if a pig is considered non ambulatory, but we do think that it will be able to recover. We need to formulate a plan, and this is when working with your veterinarian and having that VCPR really comes into play. That way we can monitor this animal, we can provide treatment, and we want to make sure that we provide a space where we reduce that competitive need for feed and water. A lot of times on farms we call those hospital pens. We're able to remove pigs from the group, especially in finisher barns, or when they're pastured with a lot of other animals, we want to remove them from that group, give them their space of their own where they don't have to compete for feed, they don't have to compete for water, and then nothing else is messing with them. We're allowing them a chance to recover, recoup, and feel better. Then again, we want to have that plan with our veterinarian that if those animals are treated and they're not recovering in two to three days, that we do understand that there may be a need to euthanize that down animal because it's not going to recover even after intensive treatment. Next slide, please. There is a cost to non ambulatory pigs and there's been a lot of research done by Matt Ritter and their estimate right now is that non ambulatory pigs are estimated to cost the US swine industry somewhere around $46 million annually. What that equals to is just over $50 pig per non ambulatory pig in the US. Those are just financial costs. There's other costs to this when you think about this as a whole picture. Major concerns for animal welfare standards when we do have those non ambulatory pigs. We have insufficient food and water consumption for those animals. They may become further injured. They would have negative impacts or interactions with other pigs and I'll show some pictures of that in a few minutes. It may be painful and negatively impact that normal pig behavior. We don't want to see this happen. This picture that you see here is a pig that is non ambulatory. That's what I would classify as a small pig that's got strep. The minute they get down there like that, and a lot of times are paddling or moving themselves around the circle, I like to call it the circle of death. When we get to a point like that, that's important that we recognize that that's a pig that needs to be euthanized. Even though we want to treat it, we want it to get better, sometimes the best thing for that animal Um, the most humane thing to do is actually euthanize that pig. Let's move on to the next slide, please. There are lots of different causes of those non ambulatory or down pigs, septic arthritis, which is an infection of the joint, a spinal infection where we have pus that forms in between those joints of the spine. Circovirus and associated diseases. A lot of times when we have those come, we have down pigs because things just get elevated really quickly. Of course, you can have broken legs or broken backs, inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, which is usually caused by a viral infection. Then we also have infection of the brain and the menges which is going to be caused by a bacterial infection. A lot of times that's associated with tail biting. Let's go ahead and flip to the next slide. When we look at the causes of non inflamatory pigs, there's more research that's been done on this. When you can see this, you can tell that on our infectious cases, those cases where we have viral or bacterial infections, if you want to hit the slide one more time, typically, over 80% of pigs those causes of those down pigs are infectious causes. It's either viral or it's bacterial versus our non-infectious causes. If we hit that slide one more time, thank you. Just under 20%. Those are our broken legs or broken backs. A lot of this is, let's look for causes. Let's look for those viruses. Let's look for the bacteria that's on that farm that's causing these pigs to go down. We have these open wounds are getting infections and something is happening. Next slide, please. A lot of times we have those infectious diseases and mainly bacterial infections, and this is chronic on a lot of our farms, it's because of tail biting. Let's look at the picture one more time or move the slide one more time. This is our first picture and this is what happens. Typically, when we have tail biting going on, something's wrong with the pig that's doing the tail biting. The good thing to do is to take some time, observe those pigs and see who is doing that tail biting. Because once they get started, it goes from this to this, which is another big warning and then finally to the third one where you really have some pretty graphic, pretty disgusting tail biting going on. Once that's that big open wound, a lot of our pigs just will not leave that alone, they mess with those pigs and that's a typical situation where one, we need to move that pig into a hospital pen so that we can treat it so that it's not being messed with those other pigs. It doesn't having those negative interactions with other pigs. Then also, we can treat it so we don't have a bacterial infection happening, and then we have a down non ambulatory pig. Tail biting sometimes has a big impact on our farms and a lot of times we not only need to identify those pigs that are getting bit, we also need to find the biters because a lot of times they're doing that out of aggression because something is happening or they're not feeling well either. Definitely time to do some increased observation on our farms. Next slide, please. These are a couple of pictures of what some of those joint infections look like on those pigs. You can see some of those areas right in there where we have a lot of pus, a lot of granular activity going on right there. That's very painful for those animals. Same thing on picture B with the spine. That's what that looks like when we have those infections there that need to be treated. That's what makes those pigs go down, what makes it hard for them to walk and for them to become ambulatory. Next slide, please. When we talk about moving our non ambulatory pigs, moving those pigs that are still conscious but cannot stand or cannot put weight on two or more limbs, we do not want to move them using any part of their body unless it is a life threatening situation. For the most part, and this is all standard for our PQA/TQA programs, when we move our non ambulatory pigs, we need to move them using something like a drag mat. We can't just grab ahold of them and move them out of the way. Remember, it actually is a willful act of abuse to drag push, shock a downed pig with an electric prod, intentionally mistreat a non ambulatory pig, including when they have difficulty standing up or inability to walk. We want to make sure that we're handling them as correctly as possible so that we don't have any animal welfare concerns. Go ahead to the next slide, please. When we want to move a non ambulatory pig, we want to be able to move them onto a mat or a slide so that we can get them out of that location, hopefully to a hospital pen or an area where they're isolated. When you move a non ambulatory pig, there are some areas that we do not want to use as handles. If you go ahead and hit the button three times, we don't want to pull them using their tail, their ears, or their snout. Those are all sensitive areas. What we do want to use when we are moving our pigs that are non ambulatory or we're rolling them onto a piece of equipment is those areas in the flank and go ahead and hit that button one more time. And one more time after that. We'll go ahead, we'll push them, we'll use their flanks, and we'll roll them over onto whatever piece of equipment you're going to use using that center or that mid rib section, trying to move that pig as best we can, being as careful as we can. Next slide, please. Let's talk just really quick about some of those tools to move our non ambulatory pigs. Paola gave some great descriptions of some tools that we use on our cattle farms and you can go ahead and press again. One of the things we have is a large animal sked. This is a really fancy piece of equipment. It costs quite a bit because it comes with a lot of really nice handles, ropes, and things to tie down the animal so we can actually move them right out of the way. That does have a fairly large cost to it. There's some other cheaper options that we can use. Go ahead and hit the next slide. Another one is a hand cart, so we can actually move that right into our barn and use that. Obviously, if you're on slats and you're a finishing barn, this isn't going to work because that darn thing is going to get stuck pretty easy. The other places that we maybe don't have slats, maybe we have grating, we could actually use this handcart and move them right in. One of our other cheaper options that we can use is simply a deer sled. You can order this on Amazon, you can order from a lot of different places, but it's that really large heavy piece of plastic that you're going to go ahead and use. You can roll that animal right onto there and sled them right out. Lot of our farms, go ahead and hit one more time, please, to advance the slide. Modify those deer slides. They do add some of those straps to go ahead and tie those down. A lot of times they put a nice large handle on there so it's easier to pull, but that will actually move pretty easily across the slatted floor. Next slide, please. We'll continue looking at some of these tools. A lot of times we can use just a drag mat. Sometimes it's just a mat that you might find in your nursery or a large rubber mat. This one's really nice because it does have those handles. You can pick it up and you can slide it around. Go ahead with the next move, please. We also have people that modify some of those mats, actually put handles on there, they reinforce that so they actually have something to pull those pigs on. But as you guys can all see, those are really low to the ground. You can simply scoot them underneath the pig as you're rolling it. It's really easy to put them on those mats. I've seen guys that have taken tires, the big flat tires and they've cut them apart, laid them open and use those and retrified a sled to use that to pull through their barns. One more click, please. Then of course, if you do have it, we want to be able to use a skid loader. Obviously, we don't want to drive those across slatted floors because that could definitely be an issue. But if you do have a skid loader, it's the same process as the cattle. You want to be very careful, but you're going to roll that pig up into the bucket, pick that bucket up and be able to move that non ambulatory animal that way. All of those are really good tools, really good thought processes when we're going to move our animals. Sometimes you don't have anything on hand and I've seen guys actually use sorting boards to be able to slip those underneath an animal and scoot them out of the way. Getting them out of those situations where you have other pigs and they're having negative interactions is super important when you're dealing with your downed animals, and then being able to get them to a place where they're not competing for feed or water and they're able to rest, recuperate and be treated is always positive when we're trying to deal with our non ambulatory pigs. I believe the next slide leads us to any questions, but we'll move right on to Mike, who's going to be talking to us a little bit about small ruminents. Thank you. We've talked about cattle, we've talked about pigs. Now we're going to move on to non ambulatory sheep and goats. Again, it's an animal that is unable to stand up on its own. This can be caused by injury or disease, excuse me, animals that are down should not be left on their side. They need to be put on their sternum. They're ruminants like cattle. If they're left on their side, they can bloat and that can add to the problems. Of course, an animal that's down, it is an emergency situation. Can we go to the next slide, please. We're talking about injuries. Paola talked about dystocia or calving problems where we can get the same problem in sheep and goats. It can be either a temporary or a permanent paralysis. Another thing is fighting, especially in our rams and our bucks. I've seen rams actually kill each other fighting. It can cause trauma, it can cause spinal injuries and these can lead to downed animals. Next slide, please. When diseases, there are several diseases in sheep and goats that can cause an animal to go down. We'll talk about Listeriosis, polio, CAE, or carine arthritis encephalitis, white muscle disease, enterotoxemia, and metabolic diseases such as pregnancy, toxemia, ketosis, and milk fever. I also want to remind people that most of the treatments for these diseases are off label or extra label and will require the guidance of a veterinarian and that all drug withdrawal time should be followed. Next slide, please. Thank you. Listeriosis and polio, Listeriosis is caused by moldy feed and the animal will go down, as we see in the top picture here, their head will be back, they'll probably be blind. They may paddle. You can see from the movement of the straw here that this animal has been paddling with their legs. This has a very poor prognosis. If caught early, you can treat it with really high levels of antibiotics and they have to be high levels to cross the blood brain barrier. But again, you need to work with your veterinarian on that. Also, polio, Listeriosis and polio can look a lot alike. The lamb here down at the bottom is a typical polio. You see it with its head back. This animal has been put on its sternum, but again, it's heads back like that. This is a neurological disorder that's caused by a thiamine or B one deficiency. They can be treated, but the treatment must be quick and thiamine has a very short shelf life, so making sure you have thiamine on hand that's not expired is important. Next slide, please. CAE, caprine arthritis encephalitis. This is an infection of the joints and in rare cases and encephalitis in young animals, usually under six months of age. Top picture here, you can see this goat has swollen knees, not necessarily going to cause it to go down, may cause it some movement issues and other production issues. This young kid at the bottom is down with the encephalitic form. There is no cure for this, so that animal would need to be euthanized. Next slide, please. White muscle disease is a selenium deficiency. If caught early, you can give selenium injections and get them headed back the right direction. If it's not caught, it can be fatal. Enterotoxemia is caused by toxins produced by clostridium bacteria. Which is always in the animal, but when overfeeding occurs or a change in diet occurs, then you get these toxins produced. It can be fatal. Most of the time, some of the time you find them just dead, other times they'll be down. There's a vaccine that you can use to prevent this. If you catch the animal early, there is an antitoxin available that can be used to treat these animals. Metabolic diseases, pregnancy toxemia, ketosis. Again, prognosis is good if it's caught early. Propylene glycol or delivering the kids or lambs and usually the animal will be okay. But again, they can go down and it's a life threatening situation. Milk fever, Paola talked about that. In cattle, it's a calcium deficiency. More often in goats and sheep, we'll see mid lactational milk fever than we will see right at the time of parturition. Again, it's a life threatening problem. The animal will be down, unable to get up, and without proper treatment quickly, they can die. Next slide, please. Beth talked about moving a down animal. Paola talked about it. I'm going to mention it a little bit, never drag them by legs, heads, whatever. Put them on a sled. If it's a small enough animal, sheep or goats, sometimes you can pick them up, but make sure you get them on their sternum so that they don't bloat and move them from side to side. Typically, when we see small ruminants go down and, the prognosis is not good. Next slide, please. If the prognosis is poor, the animal needs to be euthanized, and can do this chemically, requires a veterinarian, or you can use a firearm or captive bolt device. Next slide. In summary, on our small ruminants, it's emergency that can be caused by many different situations, a dystocia injury or diseases. It's an animal welfare issue. Again, those animals need to be treated and if the prognosis is not good, they need to be euthanized. With that, I think that was my last slide. Yes. That concludes our session.