The North of England Dexter Group is having a talk this sunday on BVD at Kirbymisperton N Yorkshire. If any one wishes to attend who is not a member of the group they are welcome to attend as long as I know they are coming. We will of course expect them to join our group once they realize what a friendly lot we are.
Please e-mail me direct if you you would like to attend, Helen does a really interesting talk and eventually England will probably follow Scotland in making it compulsory to either have a closed herd or vaccinate all your animals.
ann wrote: England will probably follow Scotland in making it compulsory to either have a closed herd or vaccinate all your animals.
I believe that the only requirement in Scotland is to annually test by either blood testing a sample group or testing all animals using tissue sampling of young. If any positives are found then testing must be expanded to other animals within the herd.
To vaccinate may have some use, however I would have thought without testing then you are likely to hide BVD within the herd as you cannot vaccinate the PI animal.
Personally I would recommend buying the tissue testing ear tags and testing all young as £5 per calf seems like a cheap way to ensure that your herd is BVD free.
Under the Scottish scheme if you are free then the cost of testing is not too great, it gets more expensive if you find you have BVD in the herd - but if you do, then it is causing a lot of hidden losses and costs, which the expense of testing will eliminate. For any herd, wherever you are, if you test 5 animals between 9 and 18 months old from every separate managment group, and get all negative, you can assume no evidence of BVD in the herd. However if you are free, and have any contact with neighbouring cattle, or share dirty equipment or even carry infection on contaminated clothes or boots, then you are at risk of getting infected, and if your herd is naive, ie has not encountered BVD before, then it will hit you hard - hence the advice to vaccinate - it is not to eliminate the disease, it is to prevent infection getting in. Testing ear tissue by tags is excellent if you are looking for PI calves, and if they are sent off promptly after birth give you the chance to get rid of the PI before it has done any damage. The thing to remember is that the tag testing only looks for virus, not antibodies, so although it is good for identifying PI animals it gives no indication of acquired infection.
The Scottish scheme steps up a notch each year, at the moment we have to declare our status, and it is illegal to move a PI knowingly other than direct to slaughter. It gets tighter next year and I think from June 2015 herds which are not negative (almost as good a term as non short) then there will be movement restrictions unless animals have been individually tested.
Duncan
Duncan MacIntyre
Burnside Dexters 00316
Burnside
Ascog
Isle of Bute
We had a nice turn out for our talk, and i think everyone went away with food for thought.
Out of the herds who were present two have had PI calves so even more food for thought. Both farms have Dairy herds near them. An intresting fact, as a lot of the dairy herds have trouble with BVD.
We had one PI cow that we had purchased,it was through a cattle dealer and it would have been clear to the person selling the animal that it was either barren or had something wrong with it as it had never calved and should have been sold fat. We got the knacker man to destroy the animal and take it away as soon as we got the result. Since then we have had 2 years where we have tested every calf (as well as any stock for finishing and barren cows) and we have not had a single case.
I personally think that if people moved to tissue sample testing at tagging, and did not sell on barren stock then we would be rid of it fairly quickly. Another interesting point, the knacker man said that we were lucky, he had been at a farm where he had to kill 15 PI calves in one go! With a move to more intensive agriculture the chances of spreading disease is very much increased. As most Dexter owners are fairly extensive and on a small scale I would have thought with some awareness and testing then most should be in a good position.
I think the tissue sampling tags are a good idea but it's such a shame that they don't seem to do an offical EID one yet or a Dexter sized primary. I prefer to use a metal tag as a secondary so ideally as I hardly ever replace them. I'd really like a combined Dexter sized primary with tissue sampling and EID built in but I might be waiting some time for that.
