@a-study-in-stars said to @ask-drferox: How do vets dehorn animals, specifically cows? Growing up, we dehorned our goats by burning the horns off but that seems pretty cruel to me if painkillers aren’t involved
If it is a veterinarian dehorning an animal, it is typically treated like surgery and usually an adult animal which was not done when it was young.
The horns of adult cattle are made of keratin wrapped around a boney core. The keratin has no feeling or blood supply, like finger nails. The bone core has lots of blood supply and feeling. It also opens into the frontal sinus.
To remove the horn of an adult cow, they’re typically sedated and local anaesthetic is used to numb the area. There are arteries within the horn that must be tied off or cauterised, and the wound must be packed to prevent flies and infection. It’s a bit of a bloody mess, to be honest, and these animals really should have pain relief for a good long while after.
An alternative, if you’re not removing the horn because it was broken already, is to just tip it. Basically you’re cutting off the pointy tip only, not any part with bone it is, which should be no more uncomfortable than cutting nails.
What most farmers will do is actually disbudding, where the horn buds are removed before the horn grows. This may be done with cautery, as in the case of your goats. There are different shaped implements to do this, or some just cut the horn bud out without cautery.
If you do this in a young calf, then the horn bud has not attached to the skull, and removing it wont open up into the frontal sinus.
Pain relief is still recommended. Cattle and sheep can easily be bred to be polled, which means they don’t grow horns at all, which is a completely pain free alternative. Goats are a bit harder, as polled goats were associated with infertility, but there’s been some progress there.
There is also a caustic paste that can be used for disbudding calves but it is not widely used in Australia and not really recommended. Our calves usually have access to the outside, where it rains and risks running into their eyes, or dairy calves are housed in groups, not individual pens, where they risk licking the paste off each other.
