Comparison of the incidence of kidney damage in cattle, pigs, sheep and goats detected at slaughterhouses as an indicator of animal health

Abstract

The incidence of kidney damage in livestock was monitored in the Czech slaughterhouses from 2010 to 2021. The results showed that the incidence of kidney damage was lower in all monitored species (P < 0.05) in fattened animals compared to adult ones. In cattle and pigs, the incidence of kidney damage was lower (P < 0.01) in fattened animals (bulls, finisher pigs) than in culled young (calves, piglets). When comparing individual categories of adult animals, the lowest incidence of kidney damage was found in does and ewes (2.68% and 3.01%, respectively), then in sows (28.45%), and the highest was in cows (40.46%). Among fattened animals, the incidence of findings in kidneys was increasing in the order of kids (0.21%), lambs (0.42%), bulls (10.46%) and finisher pigs (14.42%). Findings of chronic kidney damage were more frequent than findings of acute (P < 0.01) and parasitic (P < 0.01) origin in all observed categories of animals. The results show that, from the point of view of the incidence of kidney damage as a major consequence of imbalance between the organism’s metabolic needs and the nutrition provided to the animals, there are deficiencies of a significant level, which prove that there is still significant room for further optimization of the nutrition of individual categories of animals, that would take into account not only performance, overall clinical health, but also subclinical animal health, leading to a reduction in the incidence of kidney damage detected in animals at slaughter.