The Effect of Milk Sucking from the Dam or Glucose Administration on the Behavioural Responses to Tail Docking in Lambs

Abstract

Landa L .: The Effect of Milk Sucking from the Dam or Glucose Administration on the Behavioural Responses to Tail Docking in Lambs . Acta Vet. Brno 2003, 72: 175-182. Rubber ring tail docking is a painful procedure and elicits changes in behaviour of lambs. The aim of this study was to find out if natural suckling of milk or administration of glucose prior to rubber ring tail docking could decrease painful responses to the procedure. The first result of this study was that rubber ring tail docking elicits pain in lambs of age less than 24 hours, which has not been published yet. In the naturally suckled group (Experiment 1), suckling did not produce any significant decrease in the behavioural responses to tail docking. No significant differences in responses were observed in the group given glucose (Experiment 2) when measured over the thirty minute period after the treatment. However, in this experiment when behavioural responses were analysed for the three ten-minute periods after treatment a significant reduction of abnormal lying was found during the first ten-minute interval in the group given glucose ( p = 0.03). In this group, non-significant decreases in the incidence of head turning and overall limb activity score also occurred. This suggests that there was at least some small effect of glucose intake on the behavioural responses to the rubber ring tail docking.