Pain assessment in sheep subjected to rumenotomy according to sedation protocol: zylazine+ketamine vs zylazine+ketamine+fentanyl

Abstract

Anaesthesia is important in small ruminants to avoid the pain produced by the different surgical manoeuvres such as rumenotomy. In addition, sedatives are routinely used in pre-anaesthesia in veterinary medicine as they are beneficial for the development of general anaesthesia.The present study evaluated the effect of xylazine administered together with ketamine in comparison with the effect of xylazine administered together with ketamine and fentanyl on intraoperative and postoperative pain (both at 2 and 4 hours) induced after surgery in sheep by ruminotomy. For this purpose, one group of Canary sheep was administered a sedation protocol of xylazine together with ketamine and another group xylazine and ketamine plus fentanyl. The analysis was performed using R software version 4.05 (R Core Team (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. The results obtained in this study showed that the xylazine and ketamine plus fentanyl protocol had no influence in terms of intraoperative and postoperative pain reduction in sheep