A recent Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) and Australian Lot Feeders’ Association (ALFA)-funded project has found that the use of bovine appeasing substance (BAS) improves the welfare of beef cattle.
Through the evaluation of data from scientific publications, lead researchers Ian Lean and Helen Golder set out to investigate whether there was improvement in production and health in addition to lower stress levels in cattle treated with the substance.
Bovine appeasing substance is a synthetic version of a pheromone naturally produced by lactating cows. The natural pheromone is released from a cow’s udder and has a calming effect on calves.
“It is believed that through applying the substance behind the ear and/or behind the poll of an animal four to six hours before a stressful event, such as entering a feedlot, transport, and weaning, it will have a calming effect on the animal,” Golder said.
The project began with a literature search.
“We had strict screening criteria to identify data that was suitable for a meta-analysis,” Golder explained.
“Meta-analysis is a statistical method that allows data from different experiments on the same subject to be combined.”
Meta-analysis provides a larger dataset, meaning findings are more precise and reliable than those of individual experiments.
The project found animals that had the substance applied had a significant decrease in concentrations of the stress indicator, blood cortisol.
“The decrease seen suggested that animal welfare may be improved with the application of the bovine appeasing substance before a stressful management event,” Golder said.
The data analysed did not show an overall improvement in production or health. Golder explained this may have been due to the limited number of contributing experiments to the meta-analysis and the variation in experimental designs across them.
“Some experiments did show an improvement in body weight, lower mortality, and an increase in virus antibodies,” Lean added.
“This suggests potential for improvements in both production and health with the use of bovine appeasing substance, but more testing would be required to increase the dataset size to evaluate this.
“What we found shows a potential to improve animal welfare during routine management events, and with more research, there is potential for accompanying production and health benefits,” he said.
