Mikaella McInerney
Disbudding and dehorning are widespread practices in the farming community. But behind their apparent necessity, there’s pain, distress, and a dangerous lack of regulation.
Disbudding and dehorning are routine procedures at farms around the world. During the procedures, farmers or veterinarians remove horns from cows, sheep, and goats.
It's a highly prevalent technique: the US Department of Agriculture reported that the majority of American cows lose their horns early in life. At the same time, Australian farmers dehorn over 170,000 calves every year, and 81% of dairy, 47% of beef, and 68% of European suckler farms physically disbud or dehorn animals.
The fact that this practice is so widespread might imply that it's normal. Many farmers and dehorning advocates say that they have "no choice" but to disbud or dehorn cows and other horned animals. But a closer look at disbudding and dehorning reveals darker truths and ethical dilemmas that hide behind the routine procedure.
What is disbudding?
Disbudding and dehorning are two procedures with the same aim: removing horns from animals. Factory farms can (and do) dehorn all kinds of animals, including goats and sheep. However, cow farms perform the procedure most frequently, so we'll mostly be talking about cows throughout this article.
Disbudding and dehorning differ in their methods, as well as in terms of the age of the calf when farmers remove their horns. Disbudding involves removing the horn-producing cells in calves less than two months of age, before their horns have the chance to grow. The buds are removed before they attach to the skull. The procedure generally takes place when calves are between two to eight weeks old, but it can continue for years to come. Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine warns that any attempt at dehorning a cow older than eight weeks should be performed by a licensed veterinarian—but this is not a legal requirement.
What is dehorning?
Unlike disbudding, dehorning takes place when calves are older and the horn-producing cells have already grown and become attached to the skull. Dehorning involves cutting out the horns and any horn-producing tissue. It usually takes place when calves are between two to three months old, but some practitioners perform the procedure when the calves are older.
Even those who advocate removing horns from cows, like the meat industry, now admit that dehorning involves much more risk than disbudding. During dehorning, farmers expose the calf’s sinus and increase the risk of infection. Because dehorning results in a larger wound, there can be issues around bleeding. Sometimes flies lay eggs in the cow’s exposed sinuses, leading to disease. The meat industry tries to correct this extreme and harmful practice by advising that farmers perform disbudding instead. Some countries regulate dehorning so that it cannot occur beyond a certain age without the use of anesthetics. But dehorning is still a common practice, even if it is not as common as disbudding.
Why is dehorning and disbudding done?
The main reasons the meat industry practices dehorning and disbudding fall into two categories: safety and cost.
Factory farms prefer cows without horns because it means that they cannot hurt humans working with them or other cows. It reduces the risk of injuries to people (safety!) as well as the amount of equipment and infrastructure factory farms use to handle cows (cost!). Cows without horns require less space during transport and in feedlots, which makes it easier for farmers to raise more cows at a time for their meat, leading to greater profits.
Frequently you'll see factory farms and the meat industry touting the fact that cows without horns are less likely to hurt or injure other cows as another important reason for dehorning and disbudding. But there's profit-driven reason behind this concern for safety. Of course, factory farms don't want cows and other horned animals to hurt each other unduly—animals who were very injured or even killed by other animals would cut into the company's profits. But just as significantly for the industry, they don't want cows to be bruised by other cows. An occasional bump or bruise might not bother a living cow much, but bruised meat can't be sold. Bruised meat costs the industry millions of dollars every year. The concern here is not around the cow's welfare, but the industry's profits.
Cows are naturally born with horns, but unsurprisingly, factory farms prioritize profit over the natural life of cows. There's a wide array of abuses that afflict cows living on factory farms—dehorning and disbudding is just another example of this cruelty.
Disbudding and dehorning procedure
While dehorning and disbudding are two different procedures, depending upon how old the cow is and how much their horns have already developed, the methods used to perform dehorning and disbudding are usually the same. Here, we break down the main techniques.
Hot iron
Farmers use hot irons to dehorn or disbud cows, depending upon how old they are and whether the horns have already become attached to the cow's skull. This method works by heating an iron to red hot, then burning the horn bud away, destroying the horn-producing cells and preventing further growth. The practitioners of this method effectively cauterize a cow's horns and skull, making it impossible for their horns to grow naturally.
Young calves experience pain and distress during the hot iron procedure. Research from the Journal of Dairy Science shows that cows feel pain and fear from the handling associated with the procedure, the procedure itself, and the postoperative pain and discomfort. There are also dangers associated with the procedure. Burning the cow's horns for not long enough can result in the formation of a scur (a horn-like formation that grows in the same area as horns, but is only loosely attached to the cow's skull). Burning the cow's horns for too long can cause meningoencephalitis and cerebral infarction (obstruction to the cow's blood supply).
Dehorning paste
Dehorning paste is similar to the hot iron technique in that it stops horn growth via burning. In this case, it uses a chemical burn as opposed to a thermal burn. Dehorning paste is typically made up of two caustic substances: calcium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide. Farmers and other dehorning practitioners apply dehorning paste to the shaved buds of young calves, often when they're under 24 hours old. This dehorning method only works on very young calves, up to the age of two weeks old, as after this the calf is strongold enough to react to the discomfort and pain the dehorning paste causes. They try to scratch it off with their hooves, and sometimes cause more injury to themselves or other animals and people around them as a result.
A 2005 study found that dehorning paste causes less pain than a hot iron, but still causes pain. Anesthetic gels like lidocaine had some effect in reducing the calves' distress and pain, though notably these gels only work for up to three hours after the procedure.
Elastrator
The elastrator is actually a method of castrating cows: that is, removing their genital organs. It is sometimes used to dehorn goats, though this is not recommended and typically it is not used for dehorning, although often factory farms castrate and dehorn cows at the same time, in a traumatic and painful series of medical procedures. In any case, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AMVA) confirms that elastrator bands lead to increased chronic pain and should be discouraged.
Physical dehorning
There are also a range of physical dehorning methods, which involve removing horns with tubes, saws, wires, blades, and other specially designed dehorning tools involving physical force. This technique is typically used on older calves and cows who have more developed horns, and as such, it's associated with much more pain. The AMVA also found that physical dehorning methods like this lead to increased risks of sinusitis, bleeding, prolonged wound healing, infection, and transmission of diseases like bovine leukosis virus.
Is dehorning necessary?
Factory farms, the meat industry, and even some veterinary organizations argue that dehorning is necessary in order to create a safe workspace for handlers, workers, and other cows. By this logic, the ends justify the means. For example, Ontario's Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs acknowledges that "all methods of physical dehorning cause pain and side effects", but believe the benefits "outweigh... the short period of discomfort at dehorning time".
Dehorning is intended to protect workers' safety and, perhaps more significantly, financial profit. If a cow has been bruised by other cows, factory farms can't sell the bruised meat they obtain after killing that cow. If factory farms need to transport lots of cows (perhaps to a slaughterhouse), they can save money by transporting more cows in less space if the cows don't have horns.
So when we ask "is dehorning necessary?", we have to ask a follow-up question: what is it necessary for? Dehorning is clearly not a natural part of a cow's life cycle, or cows wouldn't be born with horns in the first place.
Is dehorning cows necessary to protect the meat industry's economic interests? Yes, absolutely. Is dehorning cows necessary for a cow's natural and peaceful life? No—in fact, dehorning cows provides another traumatic event with potentially dangerous, painful, and even life-threatening complications further down the track.
Animal welfare concerns around dehorning
Animal welfare advocates and organizations have a range of concerns around dehorning. Let’s break down some of the most significant concerns.
Lack of anesthesia
Anesthesia has been proven to reduce the pain cows experience during dehorning. There's a range of anesthesia options available for cows, from topical gels with a shorter effect to sedatives and even combinations of the two, which provide longer-lasting pain relief. However, regulation around dehorning remains scarce. In the US, there is no regulation around disbudding and dehorning cows.
Around the world, in countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, and more, animal authorities provide "recommendations" for when farmers should disbud and dehorn their cows or whether pain relief and anesthesia should be supplied, but no actual legal requirement. In fact, most of the legislation around pain relief (in countries like Australia) simply states that disbudding and dehorning can only be performed without anesthesia for animals less than six months old. Despite this, there is no evidence to show that young calves experience less pain than older cows.
It's difficult to ascertain the exact numbers of farmers who do supply anesthesia to their cows. A survey of dairy farms in Italy found that while 80% of the surveyed farms dehorned their cows, only 10% provided local anesthetics as part of the procedure and only 5% offered an analgesic for further pain relief.
Of course, anesthesia is an additional cost to farmers, making it an economic burden that many farms choose to skip. Many industry bodies do not even choose to mention it as an option. For example, Meat & Livestock Australia, an independent company that regulates standards for animal management in Australian and international markets, does not even mention anesthesia in its best practice guidelines.
Because of this lack of legislation and motivation around anesthesia, most cows experience dehorning with no pain relief at all. They undergo thermal or chemical burns or more brutal physical means of cutting out their horns fully conscious and in pain. Unable to give consent to the intrusive removal of their body parts, they must also go through the distressing and painful procedure without any pain relief whatsoever. Understandably, this is a grave concern for animal welfare advocates.
Pain management
In the report on Italian dairy farms, 52% of the farmers surveyed reported that disbudding and dehorning cause prolonged postoperative pain. There is a proven option that reduces the pain cows suffer: analgesics. Where anesthetics provide pain relief during the procedure, analgesics offer longer-lasting pain relief and facilitate the healing process. However, farms use analgesics even less frequently than anesthetics during dehorning and disbudding procedures or in the days after. This means that even in the rare cases when farmers anesthetize cows during the dehorning procedure, they're unlikely to offer them the care and pain relief cows need once the anesthesia has worn off. Imagine going in for surgery and being sent home immediately afterward without any pain relief!
The AMVA recognizes that cows and other animals experience pain during dehorning or disbudding procedures and as such, "recommends the use of procedures and practices that reduce or eliminate these effects... [such as] use of approved or AMDUCA-permissible clinically effective medications whenever possible". However, again, there is no legislation around safe, ethical, and effective pain management for animals undergoing the dehorning procedure. And because analgesics and other pain management techniques usually require care from a veterinarian, they become another unwanted expense. Once again, factory farms and the meat industry are happy to put their profit ahead of cows' pain and distress.
Risk of disease and infection
Dehorning or disbudding a cow is essentially a surgical procedure, and it leaves a wound. This wound is vulnerable to disease and infection. Dehorning and disbudding procedures can lead to a range of diseases and infections, including tetanus and bovine leukosis virus, meningoencephalitis and cerebral infarction, and anaplasmosis.
Dehorning also involves exposing a cow's sinuses, which then attract disease-carrying flies. Sometimes the flies lay maggots within a cow's sinus cavities, leading to sinusitis and causing effects such as lack of appetite, fever, nasal discharge, and more. These infections might arrive immediately after dehorning but they have also been shown to appear months later, after the wounds have apparently healed.
As a result, cows suffer and sometimes even die from painful conditions—all because of an unnecessary surgical intervention.
Where is dehorning illegal?
Dehorning is not illegal anywhere. In fact, one of the major issues around dehorning and disbudding is that there is little to no regulation around the process. Not only is it legal to dehorn and disbud cows, but it’s legal to do so at any age—usually without anesthesia or postoperative pain relief. As a result, the process runs unchecked, with every decision left up to individual farmers, who too often choose to protect their wallets rather than the living cows on their property.
Dehorning alternatives
One of the major alternatives to dehorning is called "polling", and it means selective breeding to ensure that cows do not grow horns. The polled gene is the opposite of the horned gene, and it can be introduced as a dominant gene to ensure that a cow herd gradually becomes naturally hornless. This selective breeding is possible even with cows like the famously horned Hereford breed: in 2017, 77.8% of newborn Hereford calves were polled, compared with 69.7% in 2016.
There is resistance against polling from factory farms and the meat industry, sometimes because of an outdated and now disproven belief that horned cows are superior to their polled counterparts. Perhaps more significantly, introducing polled cows in a widespread manner across the US and the rest of the world requires investment in time and money from producers, artificial insemination supplies, researchers, and breed associations. As a result, while many government and advocate bodies urge polled cow breeding as a welfare-friendly and (eventually) cost-effective alternative to dehorning and disbudding, the progress has been slow. Once again, factory farms and the meat industry prioritize profit over market change for good.
Of course, there is one other alternative to dehorning and disbudding: simply leaving cows to grow their horns in peace. The same Italian study of dehorning methods found that 20% of its surveyed farmers kept horned cows for a range of reasons, including aesthetic motivations and lack of time. 74% of these farmers reported "no difficulty" in handling their horned animals. It's possible to speculate that when farmers concentrate on raising smaller groups of cows with ethical standards, rather than corporatizing farms and creating dramatic profits at any cost to the living cows, all those difficulties in raising horned cows simply fade away.
What you can do
Disbudding and dehorning is another practice that the meat industry encourages us to think of as both normal and necessary. In reality, it's a cruel, painful practice that takes place with little to no regulation. Cows are left to suffer at the whims and expenditures of their owners, only rarely accessing anesthesia and even more rarely pain relief after the procedure itself. Further disease and infection as a result of dehorning or disbudding is common. And the movement to make dehorning or disbudding obsolete via polled genetics is faced with opposition or reluctance from factory farms to make genuine effort.
For many animal welfare advocates, that's left one alternative: go veg. Embracing a plant-based diet is one of the best ways to ensure that a cow is not suffering disbudding or dehorning for your comfort. And it sends a powerful message to the meat industry that we will not stand for the ongoing cruelty perpetrated on cows and other horned animals.
