How many vets are involved in IVF..........whats your take on the ethical issues

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Don't be worried. I knew jack all about large animal med when I came to school. I was an exotics and biomed research freak and didn't know too much about other areas. I've learned sooo much and really gotten into it.

Heck, I'm a Gemini, need to keep changing things up (including avatars ;) )

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Seriously:

6) Should I be worried that I'm going into vet school without the LA foundation you guys have (I don't mean your expertise, but your general knowledge?)

It depends on how much you want to study while you're in vet school.

You can learn it now or later, but you will learn it.

It will be of tremendous help to know the estrous cycle of cattle like the back of your hand. Or how diets of dairy & beef cattle differ. Or which antimicrobials are illegal to use in Food Production Animals and why.

But there's 5,000 other things that are equally important as well, and if you don't know it now they will teach you. But if you do already have one of those things down pat, you can devote your (precious!) studying time to the other 4,999.
 
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So now that things have cooled down :thumbup:, how about a nice conversation on Bovine AIs? From more of a layman/producer's perspective. I am aware of the hard science end of things, but it was mentioned that the actual majority of them are done by the rancher. So, what is the level of knowledge/skill of these people, and how are they going about it?

Kai
 
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Not just the rancher, usually the farmhands. Usually they are very, very well trained, usually by whoever was the most knowledgeable person before. It's kind of like passing down Grandma's apple pie recipe over the generations. They know how to handle the guns, how to handle the tanks , the semen, and get a "feel" or exactly where to put it, just as good as a vets ...something that only comes with experience. Seriously, you may laugh at the term magic inseminators, but some of these guys have rates that far exceed vets.

Of course, sometimes it gets muddled over the course of years and you'll see a rise in services per conception, and then the semen distributor rep vet comes out and figures what you're doing wrong, fixes it, etc.

But the vast majority of the time, you have people that at least competent and usually quite skilled. Any training for new people takes place under the guidance of the "old hands", the semen distributor reps, or a vet.

It is *very* common esp., in high producing areas, for staff to take care of injections, heat detection, insemination, the manual preg checks, a lot. Vet comes out every six months or so to check records, or comes over if there is a problem. It just isn't practical to ask the vet to come out day after day to administer all the injections and inseminate tons of cattle and check *all* of the pregnancies at at all sorts of dairies. If it's a small dairy and he has nothing else to do, sure. But few dairymen are going to pay for that, so they train their staff.

That is why, if there is a repro problem on the farm, as a vet you need to TALK TO THE DAIRYMEN/HERDSMEN and not just the owner, because they are involved SO much with the animals.
 
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From my experiences as a breeder, I would say that it is split 50 / 50. Some commercial dairies have a designated breeder, but many utilize the contract services of an AI company. If you want to train your own workers many AI companies with come out and spends a few days training the hands. I agree with WhtsThFrequency in that most AI techs have much higher conception rates than veterinarians. No one starts out as a good breeder, experience is the key, especially when inseminating those cows that have calved many times and now have a pretzel-like cervix! Most veterinarians do not get much training in artificial insemination compared to an AI tech that only does AI.

We may have different experiences but I disagree with the part about the foreman or herdsman herds performing preg. checks. One thing that veterinarians are commonly used for is pregnancy checks. I have worked on over 120 dairy farms throughout PA and TX and almost 90% of them have designated vet checks every few WEEKS. Being able to confirm early pregnancy (~28 days) is also something that takes many years of experience but for whatever reason this is a job that is commonly done by veterinarians. (I know few herdsman that can palpate early pregnancy with any certainty). The foreman or herdsman will administer synchronization drugs on the recommendation of the vet…based on the outcome of the pregnancy check. The vets preg. check usually determines why a cow might be open, she may be cystic or has an underlying issue like metritis. A cow must be pregnant by 85 days postpartum in order to achieve optimum milk production and calve every 12½ months. That is why it is important to have preg. checks every few weeks.

Beef operations are slightly different from dairy. The foreman usually performs the palpations because the fetus is much larger when the animals are 1st palpated (not much skill required to feel a grapefruit size mass).
 
Beef operations are slightly different from dairy. The foreman usually performs the palpations because the fetus is much larger when the animals are 1st palpated (not much skill required to feel a grapefruit size mass).

Sorry, I agree, my thoughts were jumping back and forth between beef and dairy...I've been having to do a lot of casework this week for some classes on repro issues and they switch between beef and dairy....I'm all over the place haha :)
 
I agree that vets do most of the preg checks, and the farm hands the AI. Improper palpation (i.e. screwing around in there looking for something, anything) can cause abortion in the early stages of the pregnancy, and since the sun has to be in the alignment of Jupiter blah blah blah to get a Holstein pregnant, most producers don't want to take the chance of losing their calf. Also, the vet can check for small ovaries, presence of CLs etc. while he's there preg checking anyway so they can figure out if they want to treat, rebreed her or ship her off to McDonalds before I they waste another month of feed on an open cow who is never going to get pregnant.

I don't know anything about beef cattle though.
 
Improper palpation (i.e. screwing around in there looking for something, anything) can cause abortion in the early stages of the pregnancy,


Really? I've asked this before in our Food Animal problem solving class and have been told that improper palpation abortions are exceeeeedingly uncommon (Dr. Ram said it, you'll have him next year for Therio lectures, he's great).
 
Could be. I got my info from the doctor I used to work for. He graduated from Penn in '58, so his knowledge might be outdated, but then again he might have learned a few things in 50 years :)
 
I have read that improper palpation can cause abortions in early pregnancy but I have also read that it is unlikely. It’s hard to believe that agitating the fetus wouldn't cause any damage?? But I guess the repro guy knows more than I do.
 
I'm sure it *could*...but man, you'd have to be palpating with Freddy Krueger hands or something...either that or finding the bitty fetus and manually squishing it or something, which hopefully no experienced hand would do! I'll ask another prof/clinician who's done TONS of dairy work next FA Med/Surg class....I swear he's been in the business for absolutely ever, so I'm sure he'll have an opinion.
 
I thought atresia ani was mainly a congenital thing but that would be interesting to look in to.

 
Here's one epidemiologic study that showed a linkage between rectal palpation for early pregnancy diagnosis and development of atresia coli/atresia ilei... this must be what our professor was referring to. They didn't say it was a reason to not do preg checks, but did mention that this is one reason it's important to be gentle (the mantra is "gently, with care, and lots of lube").

J Vet Med Sci. 2003 Jan;65(1):141-3.

Epidemiological investigations of an outbreak of intestinal atresia in two Israeli dairy herds.

Brenner J, Orgad U.

Neonatal Diseases Prevention Unit, Kimron Veterinary Institute, Bet Dagan, Israel.

An epidemiological investigation of an outbreak of intestinal atresia in Israeli Holstein-Friesian newborn calves showed a linkage with rectal palpation for early pregnancy diagnosis, performed less than 42 days after insemination. The odds of an exposed calf, i.e., one born to a dam that was diagnosed by early palpation as having intestinal atresia were 119.7 times higher than one born in normal control herds (95% CI; 7.4-1946.3). A total of 682 calves-at-risk was recorded from mid-1998 to mid-2000 and a total of 47 calves (6.9%) were born with intestinal atresia during this period. Two forms of intestinal atresia were recognized at post-mortem: atresia coli and atresia ilei.
 
My mind was just blown.

*pubmedpubmedpubmed*

I'm trying to think of any confounding factors...maybe, the ones that produced the atresia ani calves had also had more abortions in the past (genetic defects can be viable or nonviable, maybe a certain subset of these cows were simply producing bad calves), so people got more worried and started palpating them sooner in order to not waste any nonpregnant days....? I love making up stories!

I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around it, if it's true. At MOST, I can maaaaaybe 9and thats a stretch unless rough treatment can somehow mess up DNA/embryo division) see early palpation being linked with a *variety* of defects...but early/poor palpation consistently causing one birth defect, out of the billions of other strands of genetic material? This is a very interesting discussion!
 
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Haha, I didn't mean to blow any minds! I'm just impressed that apparently I didn't sleep through as many of my large animal GI lectures as I thought I did :)
 
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