Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Veterinary Medicine - Department of Surgery, Anaesthesiology, and Radiology

Claw affections represents one of the greatest constraints to productivity, health and welfare of dairy cattle as it causes a significant financial losses to animal breeders, directly on cattle and indirectly on the dairy production system. A total of 300069 records of 6015 dairy Holstein cows in a herd belong to large dairy farm north to Cairo, Egypt covered the period from 2012 to 2015 were used to estimate the incidence of claw disorders with special emphasis on the feeding regime. Descriptive analytical statistics for the frequencies of the different claw affections analyzed by using SPSS version 14. The main four categories of claw affections including claw horny material, claw matrix, interdigital space affections, and miscellaneous were registered and found to be 4%, 33%, 57%, and 6% respectively. And the incidence of claw affection in different parities reveals, 35.08%, 29.30%, 20.15%, 9.33%, 2.97%, 2.03%, 0.95%, and 0.19% for first till eighth parity respectively. The first sixty days after calving found to be high risky for the incidence of different claw affections and represents 25.19%. Reproductive parameters including heat interval, days open, and service per conception are found to be increased with the affected cases as 40.27, 238, and 3.7 compared to 33, 150, and 3.3 for the control group. Total milk production per cow per season (305 ME) was markedly decreased to 10298 litres with claw affections compared to 11087 litres with the control group. The effect of foot and mouth disease (FMD) and Lumpy skin disease (LSD) on incidence claw affections was very clear through the elevated incidence

Issued also as CD