Purdue University Agricultural Experiment Station Lafayette, Indiana
Mimeo AS 254 April 24, 1959 (Progress Report)
THE EFFECT OF FEEDING TRANQUILIZERS IN COMBINATION WITH EITHER IMPLANTED STILBESTROL OF ORAL ANTIBIOTIC TO FATTENING BEEF CALVES
W. M. Beeson, T. W. Perry and M. T. Mohler
The business of cattle feeding has ceased being an art and has become a science. New developments in cattle feeding research have shown the importance of such factors as balance of nutrients, simultaneous consumption of all ingredients of the ration and of certain pharmaceuticals or drugs. Thus, cattle feeders have become acquainted with such drugs as antibiotics and hormones.
More recently, research workers have beccme interested in a group of drugs known as tranquilizers. Tranquilizers have been used in one form or another in human medicine, but is was only very recently that these nerve-soothing materials were employed in large animal nutrition research.
Previous Purdue research which was designed to test the advisability of adding tranquilizers to the rations of growing and fattening cattle was not conclusive. Therefore, the two feeding experiments reported in this mimeograph were designed to make further studies into the subject of tranquilizers for beef calves.
The objectives were as follows:
1.	To compare three different tranquilizers
2. To study the effect of two levels of two of the tranquilizers
3. To study the effect of tranquilizers in the presence of either implanted stilbestrol or oral antibiotic
Experimental Procedure
Trial I. Tranquilizers plus Implanted Stilbestrol
Seventy-two Hereford steer calves from Colorado, averaging 433 lb. on November 19, 1958, were divided into 12 lots of 6 each on the basis of liveweight and apparent thrift. The daily ration consists of a full feed of ground shelled corn, 2 lb. Purdue Supplement A, 15 lb. corn silage and free choice minerals.
ATI steers were implanted with 36 mg. stilbestrol at the start of the experiment.
The research reported in this mimeograph was supported in part by grants-in-aid and material from the following:	American Cyanamid Company, Pearl River,
New York: Ciba Pharmaceutical Products Inc., Summit, New Jersey; Chas. Pfizer and Company, Terre Haute, Indiana; and Smith Kline and French Laboratories, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.