Animal Health, Welfare and Disease

Prevention is most of the answer

The five freedoms and the five things a farmer checks at a glance came earlier in this course. This part asks what happens when something is wrong, and how to stop it being wrong at all. Almost every disease question on this paper has the same shape: **cause, symptoms, prevention, treatment**. Answer all four and you have the marks. But notice which one carries the weight. Treatment costs money, loses production and sometimes loses the animal. Prevention is management: housing, hygiene, drainage, feeding. A farmer who is treating a lot is usually managing something badly.

One disease per species

The specification names four, each on a different kind of stock.

Match each disease to how you prevent it

One hard quarter

A cow has one hot, swollen quarter and clots in the milk. What should happen, and what else follows?

• Treat under veterinary direction, and keep her milk out of the tank for the whole withdrawal period afterwards
• Milk her as normal, since the milk looks mostly fine
• Cull her immediately
• Wait a week and see whether it settles

Why fluke is a drainage problem

Liver fluke is the one on this list where the prevention is not really about the animal at all. The parasite cannot get from one sheep to another directly. Part of its life cycle happens inside a **mud snail**, and that snail needs **wet ground**: rushy corners, poached gateways, the edges of drains. So the strongest prevention is to take the habitat away. Drain the wet patches, or fence them off and keep sheep away from high-risk ground at high-risk times of year. Dosing has its place, under veterinary advice, but it treats the sheep rather than the cause. An answer naming the snail and the wet ground is showing it understands the life cycle. An answer that only says "dose the sheep" is not.

Preventing fluke

Select the TWO measures that attack the cause rather than the symptom.

• Draining wet areas of the farm, or fencing them off from grazing
• Keeping sheep off known high-risk ground at the times of year when risk is greatest
• Dosing the whole flock regularly whatever the risk
• Feeding extra concentrates to keep condition up

Name the disease

Five descriptions. Name the disease each time. Three lives.

When the state comes onto the farm

Two cattle diseases are handled differently from the rest, because the consequences reach beyond one herd.

What a TB breakdown costs

A dairy herd has a TB reactor. Beyond losing that animal, what is the main economic impact on the farm?

• The herd goes under movement restriction, so no stock can be sold off the farm until it tests clear, and the business loses its normal trade for months
• The milk cannot be sold at all, ever again
• Almost nothing, since compensation covers the whole loss
• Nothing on this farm; the cost falls on the government

Keeping disease off the farm

Measures that stop disease arriving are called _____. A disinfectant _____ bath at the entrance cleans what walks in, incoming stock should be kept in _____ before joining the herd, and controlling _____ matters because they carry infection between buildings. For the two notifiable cattle diseases, agencies also impose _____ restrictions on an affected herd.

Some of these reach people

Three of the diseases on this course do not stop at the farm gate. A disease that can pass between animals and people is called a **zoonosis**, and it changes how seriously it is taken. **Salmonella** is the clearest case: birds may show little sign of it, but it causes food poisoning in people, which is why poultry flocks are vaccinated, tested and monitored. **Brucellosis** can cause a long fever in humans, and **bovine tuberculosis** can infect people too. That is why these are handled by testing and regulation rather than left to individual farms: the consequences of getting them wrong land on people who never went near the animals.

Match each condition to why it makes pneumonia worse

State the rule on treatment

Build a sentence describing how a farmer should handle treating a sick animal.

Protecting a laying flock

**"Explain how a poultry farmer reduces the risk of salmonella. (6 marks)"** "Birds are vaccinated, which reduces both infection in the flock and the risk of it reaching eggs. Feed and water are kept clean and covered, because contaminated feed is a common route in, and rodents and wild birds are kept out of the houses for the same reason. Houses are cleaned and disinfected between flocks rather than restocked straight away, and visitors and vehicles are controlled so that infection is not simply carried in on boots or wheels. Flocks are also tested, so a problem is found before eggs leave the farm. All of this is prevention rather than treatment, which matters here because the risk is not only to the birds: salmonella causes illness in people through food." Notice the last line. On a zoonosis, saying WHY the precautions are so strict is what lifts the answer above a list of measures.

A wet farm with thin sheep

A mixed farm has sheep losing condition and a dairy herd with rising mastitis cases. Work through it.

• The sheep are thin and the ground they graze includes several rushy, poorly drained corners. What is the likely cause and the real fix?
• Mastitis cases have risen since a new milking routine was introduced. Where would you look first?
• The farmer asks whether treating everything promptly would be simpler than all this management. What is the answer?

Your turn: advise on health

A farmer with cattle, sheep and a poultry unit asks how to reduce disease on the farm. Advise them.

• Choose one of the four named diseases and give its cause, symptoms and prevention
• Explain two biosecurity measures and what each one is stopping
• Explain why a bovine TB breakdown costs a farm more than the value of the animal lost
• Explain why salmonella is treated more strictly than a disease affecting only the birds