Comparison of Three Anaesthetic Options to Reduce Acute Pain Response in Kid Goats

ABSTRACT

Three options for anesthetizing the skin around the horn bud of dairy goat kids were explored. Forty-five <10-day-old Saanen goat kids from were randomly split into five treatment groups (topical anesthetic cream (TA), vapocoolant spray (VS), local anesthetic applied by jet injector (JI), control – no treatment but painful stimulus applied (C), sham – no treatment and touching sites with a finger. The painful stimulus was multiple needle pricks on the skin around the horn bud. The outcome variables measured were heart rate movement, and vocalization during treatment application and administration of a painful stimulus around the horn bud. Heart rates were greater during application of a VS compared to TA.Neither the TA nor the VS appeared to have any effect on the response to the painful stimulus. Kids in the JI group had a 96% reduced odds of expressing a marked pain response in comparison to TA group and an 83% reduction in the odds of a high movement grade during a painful procedure in comparison to the combined results of the other three treatment groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Goat kids
• pain response
• topical anaesthetics
• horn bud
• jet injector
• nerve blocks
• welfare

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the farmers involved in this study and for working around the requirements for this study, and to the VetEnt technicians that assisted with this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10888705.2022.2117553

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by The Dairy Goat Cooperative New Zealand.