As a livestock owner, eventually you will be faced with having to administer medicine to your animal. It can be scary when facing a 1,000-pound beast and being expected to pop a pill down its throat or jab it with a needle. Even if you are an organic livestock farmer, the wise owner will vaccinate their livestock against common diseases, so at some point or another you will have to take the plunge and confront the task. To save on veterinary expenses — or if you do not live near a veterinarian — you can learn the basics in delivering medications and vaccines to your livestock. Though some methods of administering medicine are fairly simple and easy to grasp, other methods are more difficult and best left to trained personnel to prevent injury to the animal.
Before you begin to treat your animal, it is vitally important that safety takes precedence over treatment and that you know the temperament of your animal. If you are unable to handle your animal with ease on a daily basis, it is best to let a more experienced person medicate it, even if it means traveling a long distance or bringing the veterinarian to your farm. For example, it is unwise for the average person without a strong, secure chute and plenty of experience to examine or treat bulls. They are too unpredictable and strong to safely handle. If your animal is docile and trained to a halter, or you have a chute with a securely mounted head gate, proceed with caution as you secure it with a halter to a sturdy post or catch it in the head gate.
Livestock medication comes in many forms. There are oral medications such as pills, drenches, gels, and pastes. Injections can be given in the muscle or under the skin. Some medicines such as antiparasitics (dewormers) can be poured directly onto the skin of the back to be absorbed. Some antibiotics and various types of fluids can be given directly into a vein, and medicine can be infused into the mammary glands via the teat canal.
Administrating the Medication
Once the type of medication and route of administration is decided upon, you will need to assemble the equipment needed to treat the animal. Oral treatments are administered via balling gun, mouth speculum, drench bottles, or gel or paste tubes:
• A balling gun is a metal or plastic tube-like device with a large end for holding pills or boluses. A plunger runs down the middle of the tube to force the pill out of
the end.
• A mouth speculum is a hollow metal tube, similar
to a vacuum cleaner tube. It is used to give cattle very large pills or capsules, or to pass stomach tubes into
the esophagus.
• Drench bottles are plastic or glass bottles with a long neck. They are used to give animals liquids.
• Gel or paste tubes come in a similar shape to a caulking tube and are delivered into the mouth through the use of a caulking gun. Always have a bucket of warm water to lubricate the tools you are using.
To give oral medications to goats, sheep, or cattle, you will stand to one side of the animal. Slowly reach over the animal’s head with your less dominant hand and grasp the edge of the lower jaw with your hand. Hold the head tightly to your body while you brace your feet at least a shoulders width apart. Holding the animal’s head tightly will prevent it from swinging its head.
Advance the hand holding the jaw toward the mouth, and place your hand between the lips, right behind the lower incisors. There is a smooth gap between the teeth in front of the jaw and the molars in the back of the jaw. Press on the roof of the mouth, and the animal will open its mouth. Gently introduce the instrument you are using to give the medication into its mouth and direct it toward the back of the throat. When you reach resistance, stop, and administer the medicine. You can injure the animal’s throat or roof of the mouth if you exert too much force in inserting the instrument.
Drench bottles or gel or paste tubes can be placed in the corner of the mouth in the gap between the teeth. Hold the head straight and parallel with the ground. The medicine then can slowly be squeezed from the bottle or tube. Allow the animal to swallow the medicine after a generous dose has been given. It may take two to three tries before the animal will swallow the entire dose. Oral medications can also be given via a stomach tube, which goes through the oral cavity, down the esophagus, and directly into the stomach. This is a much more complicated procedure and is best demonstrated before any attempt is made to treat an animal in this fashion. Have a veterinarian or more experienced livestock owner show you how to pass a stomach tube. The tube can be inadvertently passed into the trachea, or windpipe. If this happens, medicine can enter the lungs leading to lung damage, hard-to-treat pneumonia, or death.
Many medications are administered to livestock via injections. Antibiotics, vaccinations, an anti-inflammatory, reproductive medications, vitamins, and calcium are all examples of medications given via needle into the muscle or under the skin. Read the medicine labels carefully to determine the route of administration or consult your animal care provider if you have questions. For muscle or skin injections, you will need to assemble isopropyl rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, the medication, appropriate sized needles, and syringes.
Injections
On full-grown cattle, a 16-gauge needle that is 1- to 1 ½-inches long is needed for thick liquids while an 18-gauge needle of the same length is appropriate for thinner liquids. Use shorter needles for subcutaneous (under the skin) injections and longer needles for intramuscular treatments. Small calves, goats, and sheep require ⅝-inch, 18-gauge needles for subcutaneous injections. If an intramuscular injection is given, use a 1-inch, 18-gauge needle. Using too long of a needle can increase the potential that the needle will break off inside the animal if it moves while you are injecting medicine. Do not reuse needles; one-use needles are fairly inexpensive and lessen the chance for abscess formation from a contaminated needle.
Again, proper restraint and control of the animal is imperative with injections. In order to not cause scarring to prime cuts of meat, intramuscular injections should be given in the neck, about midway between the head and the front leg, and in the middle third of the neck for adult cattle. For sheep, goats, and small calves’ injections, subcutaneous injections should only be given in the neck. Try to avoid intramuscular injections if at all possible due to the smaller muscle mass in these animals. These types of animals can have severe irritation and stiffness when injections are given in the muscle.
Cattle can also be injected in the caudal thigh muscles, provided you can protect yourself from being kicked. To add a little extra security, sometimes tail restraint, or tail jacking, can be used by a second person who holds the tail straight up near the base. This maneuver makes it difficult for cattle to kick. Be careful not to put too much pressure on the tail, as you can damage the nerves and muscles.
Once you have determined your injection site — an area free of manure and moisture — swab the area with isopropyl alcohol. Remove the needle from the syringe if you have attached it to the syringe and remove the cap. Hold the needle by the hub with your thumb and forefinger, and quickly jab the needle into the selected site. Check that no blood appears in the hub. If blood appears, repeat the needle stick at a different site to avoid injecting the medication into the blood stream, which can be deadly. Attach the syringe to the needle and inject the medication. Up to 20cc of medication can be injected into one site in adult cattle; no more than 10cc should be given in one spot for goats, sheep, and calves.
Subcutaneous injections of certain medications and some calcium solutions can be given in the loose skin on the front of the neck or in the loose skin in the chest area on the side of the animal behind the front legs. Safely secure the animal and prepare the site as you did with intramuscular injections. Then insert the needle into the skin almost parallel to the body until it pops through the inner side of the hide. Up to 125cc of calcium solution can be given to adult cattle under the skin in this manner. Do not give more than 50cc in any one spot for the smaller livestock For thicker medications like penicillin or tetracycline, no more than 30 to 35cc should be given in one spot for cattle; 15cc is enough of a dose for smaller cattle. Never inject dextrose-containing solutions (sugar solutions) under the skin. Abscesses, cellulitis, or skin sloughing can occur in these cases.
Many medications can also be given directly in the vein, but that is best learned by direct observation, due to the danger of causing bleeding from an injured vein and the possibility of injecting medicine directly into the neck artery.
There are other routes of medicating cattle that the average cattle owner can tackle. Deworming medication and lice control have been conveniently formulated in a pour-on solution which is, as the name suggests, poured along the top of the animal’s back. Nothing could be easier, as long as directions listed on the medicine bottle are followed closely. Usually you will need to do this on a dry day and keep the animal dry for up to 24 hours after treatment to prevent the solution from washing off the skin.
An important item to note is drug withdrawal times. Many antibiotics will have a withholding time before your animal can be sold for meat or before the milk can be sold. Meat packing plants and milk plants regularly test for antibiotic use. If it is found that you sold an animal that still has antibiotics in its system, you may be fined. Milk processing plants may force you to pay for milk that was comingled with your milk, as the entire load will need to be discarded. At the very least, you will get a visit from your local Food and Drug Administration representative.