Lameness detection is a world-wide challenge to farmers and veterinarians. Traditionally, one uses visual observation to make judgment on a cow's lameness or soundness. Visual observation heavily depends on the observer's experience, hence is subjective or observer-dependent. And even worse, it is inconsistent. It's reported that the agreement between veterinarians can be as low as 45% [1]. It ...

Lameness of dairy cattle is an economic and welfare issue. It is the third most important health related economic loss facing the dairy industry, following fertility and mastitis. Most economic loss due to lameness results from costs of premature culling, veterinary treatment, increased labor, discarded milk, prolonged calving interval, and reduced milk production (Kossaibati and Esslemont, 199...

Assessment of lameness is an everyday task for many veterinarians, it is an essential part of a prepurchase examination and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) has included it into the list if 'day one skills' for veterinary graduates. Recently, the first public National Equine Health Survey pioneered by the Blue Cross animal charity and supported by the British Equine Veterinary As...

Background: Visual assessment of equine lameness is an everyday veterinary task suffering from poor diagnostic accuracy. The aim this study was to quantify the impact perceptual learning game ‘LamenessTrainer’ on skill development. Methods: Thirty-six undergraduate students engaged in four modules teaching fore- and hindlimb lameness. Computer animations horses displayed 0% (sound) 70% (moderat...

Lameness is a frequent reason for captive waterfowl to be presented veterinarian. This case report describes unilateral right hindlimb lameness in an 11-year-old, female marbled duck kept at zoological collection the United Kingdom. Although bird was euthanased after clinical and radiographic examination, both supported diagnosis of degenerative joint disease, postmortem examination revealed re...

BACKGROUND Subjective pain assessment scales have been widely used for assessing lameness in response to pain, but the accuracy of these scales has been questioned. To assess scale accuracy, 10 lame, presa Canario dogs with osteoarthritis (OA) associated with bilateral hip dysplasia were first treated with mesenchymal stem cells. Then, potential lameness improvement was analyzed using two pain ...

The milk yields of 1824 cows were used to investigate the effect of lesion-specific causes of lameness, based on farmer treatment and diagnosis of lame cows, on milk yield. A three-level hierarchical model of repeated test day yields within cows within herds was used to investigate the impact of lesion-specific causes of lameness (sole ulcer, white line disease, digital dermatitis and other cau...

The objective of this study was to identify claw lesions causing clinical lameness in lactating Holstein Frisian (HF) crossbred cows in dairy cattle. Seventy dairy farmers were interviewed at the monthly meetings of Progressive Dairy Farmers Association of Ludhiana, Punjab, India. Ten dairy farms were randomly selected as per probability proportional to size and a total of 450 lactating HF cros...

Lameness is an important factor for culling animals. Strong legs and feet improve herd life of dairy cows. Therefore, many countries include leg and feet conformation traits in their breeding programs, often as early predictors of longevity. However, few countries directly measure lameness related traits to include these in a breeding program. Lameness indices in 3 different lactations and 5 le...