Wellness Management in Beef Feeder Cattle: Changing Mental Models to Support Beneficial Emergent System Behaviors

Abstract

Despite evidence-based "improvements" in animal health products and management, losses to bovine respiratory disease have increased with associated animal wastage, welfare concerns, and antimicrobial use; questioning the fitness of current disease-centric paradigms for improving critical outcomes in complex adaptive systems. Systems thinking is used to model a paradigm shift from mental models based on management of failure outcomes in a flawed pass/fail dichotomy to one of managing success outcomes on a continuum. In the proposed wellness paradigm, the notion of health as absence of disease is rejected and replaced with perspective of disease as symptomatic of systems insufficiently supporting wellness.

Keywords: Bovine respiratory disease (BRD); Mental model; Sickness behavior; Systems thinking; Treatment success; Well-being; Wellness; imal welfare.