When a coughing steer steps into the chute, you might only have a few moments to decide if this animal is likely to recover with treatment or will further intervention be futile. The difference matters, not only for the animal’s welfare but for treatment costs, labor and antimicrobial stewardship.
Dr. Brad White of Kansas State University has been working on ways to make those chuteside decisions more accurate. His recent presentation at the 2025 American Association of Bovine Practitioners Annual Conference laid out new tools and technologies that could be incorporated into everyday feedlot medicine.
“[The] goal of chuteside testing is not just diagnostics, it’s which bucket can I put [the animal] in,” White says. “What if I could change the likelihood, or I had a diagnostic tool that would give me a better prognosis, and I had more chance of putting the ones that were going to live into this bucket and more chance of putting the ones that won’t live into the other bucket.”
White suggests thinking of chuteside decision-making using the Chuteside Ps:
- Precision: How accurately can we distinguish specific disease syndromes that might display similar clinical signs?
- Prescription: What treatment is appropriate based on the specific disease status?
- Psychology: How do our own biases shape decisions under pressure?
- Prioritization: Which cases should be segregated to provide additional therapeutic and management procedures to a smaller subset?
- Prognosis: What is the animal’s likelihood of recovery?
Why this matters
Misclassification can have real economic consequences. In a study evaluating over 3,800 calves diagnosed with acute interstitial pneumonia (AIP) chuteside, 42% of treated animals finished the feeding phase and showed positive return, while 25% were culled and 33% died.
On average, estimated net returns were positive for cattle that finished with their cohort, even after multiple treatments ($98 for one treatment, $85 for two, and $46 for three). Animals that were culled after one to three treatments averaged negative $900 of net returns, meaning that in all cases, it would have been better to keep the calf then cull it.
While most veterinarians might consider AIP a death sentence diagnosis for cattle, this work demonstrates that is not always the case.
Clinician bias cannot be ignored when considering diagnosis. Under pressure, veterinarians and feedlot crews might over-diagnose or lean on familiar categories.
For example, AIP is most frequently diagnosed at 80 to 140 days on feed; however, necropsy evaluations have shown a more even distribution of cases throughout the feeding phase.
Chuteside technologies might be useful to incorporate in an effort to avoid inherent human biases.
Chuteside Tools
There are several tools under investigation that could be useful for chuteside antemortem cattle assessment. Three that have shown some promise are:
Cardiac troponin I: Elevated levels have been shown to be highly specific for poor outcomes in bovine respiratory disease cases, though sensitivity is limited. Animals testing positive have a much lower likelihood of successful recovery.
Mucous membrane assessment: Animals with abnormal mucous membranes have been found less likely to finish. However, this testing had low sensitivity and high specificity.
Targeted thoracic ultrasound: Can be used to reveal interstitial changes that are not apparent on a physical exam, helping differentiate acute from chronic respiratory conditions.
Along with these, predictive models using multiple diagnostic inputs have shown promise for determining case outcomes. However, these are hard to use quickly chuteside.
“There’s no single metric that’s going to get us there,” White advises. “Our thought process is that we’re likely going to have to combine [metrics]. Part of the trick is figuring out which places to apply them.”
Practical Challenges
Integrating new diagnostics is not without hurdles. Equipment cost, chuteside practicality and training all matter. Time pressures in the chute are real, and not every feedlot crew is ready to adopt ultrasound or biochemical assays into their routine.
Field validation is another concern. Tools that work in controlled research settings might not always translate seamlessly to the dusty, high-pressure environment of a feedlot. Veterinarians must balance the potential gains with the realities of implementation.
Looking Ahead
White hopes that each veterinarian and producer asks themselves these important questions:
“How can I be more precise with these cases, and how can I use prognosis to prioritize them based on my management decisions? We’ve got many of the same classes of treatments and therapies that we’ve had for years; how can we make sure that we’re using them at the right place and the right time?”
