Feedlot cattle production confines millions of animals in high-density outdoor pens, creating conditions that promote disease, particularly bovine respiratory disease, which is the leading cause of cattle death in North American feedlots.
Bovine respiratory disease causes severe suffering including fever, difficulty breathing, and without treatment, death. The feedlot model that concentrates animals from diverse sources in close proximity creates near-ideal conditions for respiratory pathogen transmission. Individual cattle suffering from BRD commonly go undetected because cattle instinctively mask illness and pen-level observation makes individual monitoring difficult. The welfare problems of feedlots extend beyond disease to include heat stress, limited space, and complete absence of natural grazing behavior that cattle are strongly motivated to perform.