Neonatal calf diarrhea, or scours, is the leading cause of illness and death in young calves, causing significant suffering that is largely preventable through vaccination, colostrum management, and hygiene.
Scours causes profound suffering in young calves — dehydration, severe abdominal pain, weakness, and inability to stand affect animals in the most vulnerable days of their lives. The suffering is compounded by the fact that affected calves cannot communicate their distress and may deteriorate rapidly if monitoring is inadequate. The preventability of most scours cases — through colostrum management, vaccination, and clean calving environments — makes the welfare case for prevention programs compelling. Every calf that develops preventable scours represents a failure of management that imposes real suffering on an individual animal. Investing in prevention infrastructure and training is a high-impact welfare intervention because it operates at the population level, reducing suffering across entire calf cohorts.