The majority of buffalo owners belonged to the middle age group with primary to secondary education level with marginal to small size of landholdings and had kept Surti and Mehsani buffalo with medium herd size. The area selected for the study is not having home tract of any specific breed. However, most farmers keep a mixed population of Surti and Mehsani buffaloes because the home tract of both these breeds is just nearer to their living area. The majority (58.33%) of them have not received training related to animal husbandry. They are not passionate to learn new things and have less interest in keeping livestock alone. For the breeding of buffaloes, the majority of buffalo owners (52.92%) were using artificial insemination technique (Table 1).
A perusal of the data shown in Table 2 indicates that a cent per cent of buffalo owners remain present during the calving process. The majority of buffalo owners had adopted suckling (99.58%), cleaned the calf immediately after birth (88.75%), and had not used disinfectant after cutting of navel cord (87.91%).
Maousami et al. (2013) also reported a similar result with 96.00% of owners not disinfecting the navel cord after cutting. Due to cent per cent farmers’ presence during calving, the majority of them used to clean the buffalo calf after calving. As owners are aware of buffalo’s powerful mothering instinct and not letting down milk in the absence of their young ones, they have adopted suckling. It was observed that only 32.91% of farmers had cut the navel cord of buffalo calves. In their study,
Tiwari et al. (2007) observed that none of the farmers were used to cut the navel cord of the newborn.
The majority of buffalo owners had provided colostrum (99.58%), milk (98.75%) and concentrate feed (87.92%) to their calf. More than one-fifth of the buffalo owners provided colostrum within one hour of calf birth (22.50%). A similar result related to the present study was reported by
Mahla et al. (2015). Contrary to this,
Tiwari et al., (2007) observed that the majority (87.80%) of the farmers had supplied colostrum after expulsion of placenta. Late supplementation of colostrum by the buffalo owner is mainly due to a lack of awareness about scientific animal husbandry practices. About 27.08% and 23.75% of buffalo owners had provided calf starter and milk replacer to their calf, respectively. The majority of buffalo owners had used deworming agents for their calves (84.58%) but not maintained regularity as per scientific recommendation. The majority of the buffalo owners knew the effect of deworming on calves. They used deworming agents to calves initially but did not follow the standard deworming schedule.
Similarly,
Tiwari et al. (2007) also observed lacunae in the regular provision of deworming agents to the calves. More than half of the buffalo owners had given FMD vaccine to their buffalo calves, while vaccination for Hemorrhagic Septicemia and Brucellosis was observed very low, respectively. None of them had given Anthrax and BQ vaccines to their buffalo calves.
Data in Table 3 indicated that the buffalo calf mortality rate was observed 45.00% and 14.58% in male and female buffalo calves, respectively with an average of 24.26% in the operational area of DVK, Gujarat. A similar result was obtained by
Maousami et al. (2013) where they have reported an average 22.45% mortality in buffalo calves. A higher mortality rate may be due to the negligence of males. There was an overall 24.26% mortality rate observed in the buffalo calves in the study area.
Shakya et al. (2017) reported that overall buffalo calf mortality in and around Jabalpur district was 42.11% which is higher compared to our study.
Tiwari et al. (2007), in their study of buffalo calf health care in commercial dairy farms, had also reported 81.09% mortality which was just four times more than our study.
Most of the death in buffalo calves was observed during the first three months of age (90.98%).
Shakya et al., (2017) reported similar results with the present study. In the present study, it was found that supplementation of colostrum within one hour was very less, that may result in poor development of immunity results in higher mortality rate in the initial period of life. The buffalo calf mortality rate was found to be higher in winter (45.08%), followed by summer (29.51%) and monsoon (25.41%) (Table 4). Similar results were obtained by
Patil et al. (1991), who reported the highest mortality (38.29%) during winter (November-January), followed by the monsoon season (32.5% in June-October) and summer (29.2% in February-May). The reason of the higher mortality rate in winter may be that in this study, it was observed that the housing practice of protecting animals from inclement weather that is for cold is very less (67.50%) as compared to two other seasons (100% for summer and 87.50% monsoon). The increased mortality rate during the cold season might be attributed to environmental stress associated with cold inclement weather wherein sudden climatic changes make calves prone to conditions like pneumonia and diarrhoea. High relative humidity and less bright hours lead to unhygienic calf sheds and wet beddings that make young calves more susceptible to infections (
Yadav et al. 2019).
Table 5 revealed that the correlation between buffalo owners’ received training in animal husbandry with female buffalo calves mortality was found negative and significant. Awareness and knowledge gained by the buffalo owners in training are helping them to raise their buffalo calves effectively. There was a positive and significant relationship between herd size and female buffalo calves mortality. This may be due to the larger herd size. Higher calf mortality with increase in herd size in commercial dairy farms was reported by
Sreedhar and Sreenivas, (2015). Higher calf mortality in the larger herd may be associated with a larger group size of calves resulted in lesser time spent per calf or more opportunity for pathogen exchange, while improved management and care in the small herd may improve survival rate (
Zucali et al. 2013;
Seppa-Lassila et al. 2016). A major reason of urban dairy farm mortality was the parasitic infestation in the calves due to which their health deteriorated and they often died (
Sharma and Mishra, 1987). There was a negative and significant relationship between colostrum feeding time, providing milk replacer, calf starter, concentrate feed, mineral mixture, dewormer, and vaccines to calves with female buffalo calf mortality (Table 5). The risk of calf mortality increases drastically with delay in colostrum feeding (
Zucali et al. 2013) due to inadequate passive transfer of immunoglobulin through the gut, which may subsequently suppress the disease resistance capacity of calves (
Godden, 2008).
Pal et al. (2016) observed 79-85 percent reduction in calf mortality under field conditions when deworming was practiced from 1-2 weeks after birth. There was a negative and non-significant correlation between cleaning the calf immediately after birth, cutting the navel cord, provide milk and salt to the calf with female buffalo calf mortality. Some of the animal health management practices like providing milk, earlier colostrum feeding, milk replacer, calf starter, concentrate feed, mineral mixture and salt, deworming and vaccination, cleaning the calf immediately after birth and cutting the navel cord to calves was associated with decrease the female buffalo calf mortality (Table 5).
