It's a Saturday morning & you were planning on spending your weekend relaxing at home, maybe doing some yardwork, & reading that new book you picked up. But at 9:25am you get a text from one of your students - their project pig has some diarrhea & isn't excited about breakfast. You know this pig well & they've never not been interested in breakfast. You gauge your options:
The pig will probably be fine - tell the student to update you this afternoon
The pig might not be fine - you need to get over to the farm right away
The pig is probably fine but someone should take a peek - you or your teaching partner will head over this afternoon just to check things out
How can we make this situation less ambiguous?
If you have worked with your veterinarian & already have treatment protocols in place, you can make a more informed decision. The student can do a basic physical exam, relay that information to you, & you can sort through your treatment protocols to see which one sounds most like this situation. Then, because treatment protocols are written to handle each specific disease, you can take some initial steps & see how the pig responds before totally throwing away your precious time to yourself.
So why can't I just give the pig some antibiotics & call it a day?
Well, because just like us, not all illnesses are treated with antibiotics. It's essential to understand that antibiotics work against bacterial infections. But, as we know, not all disease processes are a result of bacterial infection - it could be viruses, parasites, environmental changes or conditions, stress, bad feed, etc.
So reason #1 is simple - if it's not bacterial, antibiotics won't work.
Other reasons are a bit more complicated. The biggest secondary reason is that we want to use antibiotics appropriately. Why? Well, there are a few good reasons:
You are training the next generation of agriculturalists - we need to demonstrate the correct, responsible use of medications
We don't have that many antibiotics for livestock species & we want them to continue working - giving animals antibiotics who don't actually need them contributes to antimicrobial resistance, meaning bacteria can actually mutate to become stronger against the mechanism of action of these medications
Every medication we give a food producing species has a withdrawal period associated with it, which is the period of time that we cannot send that animal to slaughter or use milk or eggs from that animal due to lingering medication levels - using antibiotics on animals that don't need them is giving them a withdrawal that needs to now be tracked
Some antibiotic use can cause other issues! Sheep & goats are infamous for getting the weird gut funk after antibiotic treatment - kinda sad, not really into feed. This is because they have millions of bacteria in their rumen helping to digest their feed that can also be negatively affected (read: killed) through normal antibiotic use. We can support this with other nutritional supplements, but why would we if we don't need to?
Okay, so what am I supposed to do?
Follow your treatment protocols! Diarrhea is probably the most overtreated illness. Most of the time (big generalization, right there), diarrhea is transient & resolves itself. You've had days where your stomach just isn't right & so do our livestock species. Before we can say that for sure, we need to make sure there haven't been any feed changes, extra feed given, water has been available, etc - we need to troubleshoot a bit. And of course, some disease processes should absolutely be treated with antibiotics.
So if in doubt, call your vet for advice. But you can save yourself (& your vet & other members of your management team) lots of grief by spending the time up front to create those treatment protocols!
Call your vet (or me) to get those treatment protocols written!
