TB Testing on Uni farms

Have been out Bovine TB testing all the cattle on the Uni farms for the last few weeks - the few week old calves, all the beef animals and dairy cows had to be done!

We went out and tested them on Mondays and read the results 72 hours on Thursdays.

Was really interesting to spend time with Phil the vet and different farmers to ask loads of questions and see how they got on with it; was interesting to ask differing opinions about the Badger cull too...
Apart from my dairy placement I've not had much else to do with cattle so this was really good for me getting to handle so many animals in such a short space of time. We had young calves, growing beef animals and old dairy cows which all needed to be tested - I'd never used a cattle crush before either so I learned pretty quickly that if the human operating it isn't quick enough, you're straight on to chasing that cow back into the crush!

The farmers see it as a bit of a chore and loads of paper work, the vets see it as something which has to be done (and a money maker) and the farm staff see it as more paperwork, a chance to check every animal has 2 ear tags and to double check the cows we have. are the cows we think we have!

It all went really well and thankfully we didn't have any TB positive animals.