Cows and vaccines. Here's what we do with a common sense approach.

Cows and vaccines isn't exactly dinner table conversation. But it's a question we get, so let's talk about it plainly.

A Quick History of Vaccinating Cattle

Vaccinating livestock isn't new. Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine for cattle and sheep anthrax back in 1881, and not long after that, the Pasteur Institute introduced blackleg vaccination kits around 1895. At the time, blackleg was causing heavy losses to cattle herds across the western United States. That kit was about as low-tech as it gets: a mortar and pestle, a glass funnel with linen filters, and packets of vaccine that had to be ground up and mixed with water before injecting.

The point is, the blackleg vaccine isn't some new development. It's one of the oldest tools in the cattle world, and it's been doing the same job for well over a century.

What's changed is everything around it. As cattle operations got bigger and more animals started moving through fewer facilities, the list of vaccines needed to keep a herd healthy got longer too.

What Conventional Cattle Are Usually Given

A typical calf in the conventional system gets anywhere from 3 to 8+ separate vaccinations, depending on the operation. Nearly all cattle entering feedlots get vaccinated for BVD and IBR (two of the major viral causes of respiratory disease) and about 95% of cattle receive these. Often that respiratory shot is a combo vaccine covering four viruses at once: IBR, BVD, PI3, and BRSV.

Then there's the clostridial vaccine, usually a "7-way" or "8-way," which in a single shot covers blackleg along with several other clostridial diseases (black disease, malignant edema, gas gangrene, and a few types of enterotoxemia). Only about a quarter of cattle entering feedlots get vaccinated for the bacterial causes of respiratory disease specifically, like Mannheimia or Pasteurella, so that's often a third shot for calves considered higher-risk.

Add it up, and a calf can be vaccinated against 10+ different viruses and bacteria before it ever sets foot on a feedlot. And it often this happens more than once, with another round of shots given again at branding, at weaning, and again on arrival.

On top of the vaccines, antibiotics often get added to feed or water, mainly to prevent the kinds of problems that come up when a lot of animals are kept close together.

None of this is a knock on other farmers. It's just what it takes to manage cattle packed together, eating a diet they didn't evolve to eat, dealing with the stress of transport and crowding. Some research even suggests that cattle who get more rounds of vaccination before reaching the feedlot end up with worse health outcomes... which says less about the vaccines themselves and more about how stressful that whole system is on an animal's body.

What We Do at 2 Coots

One vaccine. Blackleg. That's it.

Here's why we still give that one. Blackleg is caused by a bacteria that lives in the soil and can survive there for years. If cattle have ever grazed land, the spores are probably already there. It's not contagious, but it's almost always fatal, and animals are often just found dead with no warning. There's no real treatment once it sets in.

So this isn't a "just in case" vaccine. It's protecting against something that's already in the ground, that can take a healthy animal down fast, and that you can't treat after the fact. That's common sense to us. Skip it, and you're gambling on an animal's life over something cheap and easy to prevent.

For what it's worth, it's also about as old-school as vaccines get. It's not mRNA, not new technology, not anything experimental. It's a toxoid vaccine, a type that's been used in cattle for decades with barely any change in how it's made. The vet equivalent of a tetanus shot. Same basic idea Pasteur was working with over a hundred years ago, just refined.

Why People Care About This Stuff in the First Place

We get why this matters to people. When animals are raised in crowded, high-stress conditions, they need a longer list of vaccines and routine antibiotics just to stay healthy enough to make it to market. Some of that ends up being a question people have about what's in their food, and a lot of it is really a question about the system the animal came from.

We're not here to tell you what to think about any of that. But we can tell you what we do, because it's simple: one vaccine, no antibiotics, and a way of raising cattle that doesn't require either one.

Why That's the Only One We Need

Our cattle live outside, on grass, in small herds, the way cattle have lived for most of history. They're not packed into pens. They're not eating a diet that messes with their gut. They're not getting shipped across the country and mixed in with cattle from a dozen other farms.

Take away the crowding, the stress, and the unnatural diet, and you take away most of the reasons disease spreads in the first place. Cattle raised outdoors and in less intensive conditions tend to need far fewer antibiotics than animals raised in confinement, and that tracks with what we see on our own ranch. We don't reach for antibiotics because we don't need to.

It's kind of wild how much changes when you just... let cows be cows. It's just common sense.

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