New milking parlour? - score those teat ends first!

Abstract

As part of a mastitis investigation and/or when a client has installed a new milking machine, one of the most important routines to carry out is teat-end scoring to record the level of moderate-to-severe teat-end hyperkeratosis in the herd. There is strong evidence that a greater degree of teat-end hyperkeratosis increases the risk of clinical mastitis in dairy cows (Neijenhuis et al., 2001). Teat scoring system An international teat-scoring system has been devised by the members of Teat Club International (TCI) (Ohnstad et al., 2003) and is now widely in use in the dairy industry. For routine field evaluation, teat ends can be considered to fall into four classes: 1. No ring (N) 2. Smooth ring (S) 3. Rough ring (R) 4. Very rough ring (VR) (Fig. 2)