Cattle Metabolic Disease Prevention

Metabolic diseases including milk fever, ketosis, and grass tetany cause significant suffering in cattle that targeted prevention can largely eliminate.

Key Facts

Milk fever (hypocalcaemia) causes muscle weakness and collapse in dairy cows post-calving
Ketosis causes reduced appetite, weight loss, and can progress to fatal fatty liver disease
Grass tetany (hypomagnesaemia) causes muscle tremors, convulsions, and death in grazing cattle
Dietary supplementation, transition management, and monitoring prevent most metabolic disease cases
Subclinical disease occurs at much higher rates than clinical disease, causing welfare compromise without obvious signs

Welfare Considerations

Metabolic diseases cause intense suffering from muscle weakness, organ failure, and collapse. The suffering is preventable through proactive management that has proven effective in practice. Investment in prevention is both more humane and more economically rational than reactive treatment.

What You Can Do

Support dairy farms with structured transition cow and metabolic disease prevention programs
Advocate for metabolic disease monitoring as a welfare standard in dairy certification
Choose dairy from farms with documented low metabolic disease rates