Would it be feasible/useful to accelerate the adoption of hornless (“naturally polled”) cattle, to remove the need for painful dehorning?
There are around 88M farmed cattle in the US at any point in time, and I’m guessing about an OOM more globally. These cattle are for various reasons frequently dehorned—about 80% of dairy calves and 25% of beef cattle are dehorned annually in the US, meaning roughly 13-14M procedures.
Dehorning is often done without anaesthesia or painkillers and is likely extremely painful, both immediately and for some time afterwards. Cattle horns are filled with blood vessels and nerves, so it’s not like cutting nails. It might feel something like having your teeth amputated at the root.
Some breeds of cows are “naturally polled”, meaning they don’t grow horns. There have been efforts to develop hornless cattle via selective breeding, and some breeds (e.g., Angus) are entirely hornless. So there is already some incentive to move towards hornless cattle, but probably a weak incentive as dehorning is pretty cheap and infrequent. In cattle, there’s a gene that regulates horn growth, with the hornless allele being dominant. So you can gene edit cattle to be naturally hornless. This seems to be an area of active research (e.g.).
So now I’m wondering, are there ways of speeding up the adoption of hornless cattle? If all US cattle were hornless, >10M of these painful procedures would be avoided annually. For example, perhaps you could fund relevant gene editing research, advocate to remove regulatory hurdles, or incentivize farmers to adopt hornless cattle breeds? Caveat: I only thought and read about all this for 15 minutes.
Only 7.8 percent of calves born or expected to be born in 2017 had horns, indicating the widespread use of polled breeds. For horned calves that were dehorned, the average age at dehorning was 107.0 days.
Thanks, that’s encouraging! To clarify, my understanding is that beef cattle are naturally polled much more frequently than dairy cattle, since selectively breeding dairy cattle to be hornless affects dairy production negatively. If I understand correctly, that’s because the horn growing gene is close to genes important for dairy production. And that (the hornless dairy cow problem) seems to be what people are trying to solve with gene editing.
Would it be feasible/useful to accelerate the adoption of hornless (“naturally polled”) cattle, to remove the need for painful dehorning?
There are around 88M farmed cattle in the US at any point in time, and I’m guessing about an OOM more globally. These cattle are for various reasons frequently dehorned—about 80% of dairy calves and 25% of beef cattle are dehorned annually in the US, meaning roughly 13-14M procedures.
Dehorning is often done without anaesthesia or painkillers and is likely extremely painful, both immediately and for some time afterwards. Cattle horns are filled with blood vessels and nerves, so it’s not like cutting nails. It might feel something like having your teeth amputated at the root.
Some breeds of cows are “naturally polled”, meaning they don’t grow horns. There have been efforts to develop hornless cattle via selective breeding, and some breeds (e.g., Angus) are entirely hornless. So there is already some incentive to move towards hornless cattle, but probably a weak incentive as dehorning is pretty cheap and infrequent. In cattle, there’s a gene that regulates horn growth, with the hornless allele being dominant. So you can gene edit cattle to be naturally hornless. This seems to be an area of active research (e.g.).
So now I’m wondering, are there ways of speeding up the adoption of hornless cattle? If all US cattle were hornless, >10M of these painful procedures would be avoided annually. For example, perhaps you could fund relevant gene editing research, advocate to remove regulatory hurdles, or incentivize farmers to adopt hornless cattle breeds? Caveat: I only thought and read about all this for 15 minutes.
More recent data for US beef cattle (APHIS USDA, 2017, p.iii):
Thanks, that’s encouraging! To clarify, my understanding is that beef cattle are naturally polled much more frequently than dairy cattle, since selectively breeding dairy cattle to be hornless affects dairy production negatively. If I understand correctly, that’s because the horn growing gene is close to genes important for dairy production. And that (the hornless dairy cow problem) seems to be what people are trying to solve with gene editing.