Avaliação de três técnicas cirúrgicas para castração de bovinos ¾ agnus

Abstract

Orchiectomy is the most performed surgical procedure in cattle worldwide. There are several surgical techniques, with different types of incision, methods of hemostasis and ways of removing the testicles. The objective of this work is to evaluate three surgical castration techniques in ¾ Angus cattle. The techniques tested were the open lateral U-shaped incision (UA), open transverse incision (TA) and closed transverse incision (TF). In all techniques, the hemostasis method used was the spermatic cord ligation. The experiment was conducted in a commercial confinement and included 84 animals, equally distributed among the three groups. It consisted of visual assessments to characterize the surgical wound in scores, observing healing, tissue exposure, granulation tissue, necrosis, edema, secretion, type of secretion, funiculus consistency and funiculus volume, in addition to weighing, surgery time, scrotum size, rectal temperature and hematocrit of the animals. There was a significant difference between the groups in most of the visual assessments, with the UA and TA groups being superior to the TF technique. The healing score and the tissue exposure score stand out as the ones with the greatest impact on the general assessment of the techniques. On the last day of evaluation, only three animals (3.57%) had a low healing score, with the UA and TA techniques being significantly different from the TF technique. In the general evaluation, it was shown that the first nine days after surgical castration are very important for a good performance and recovery of the animals. It is concluded in the general evaluation that the TF technique had a lower performance than the UA and TA techniques, and should not be used for the castration of ¾ Angus cattle. Keywords: Surgical castration; ¾ Angus cattle; Orchiectomy; Testicle; Scrotal incision; Healing; Beef cattle