It is not un common to pile up manure from cattle or poultry sheds in fields which cattle have access to before it is spread

January Newsletter

Botulism

It is not uncommon to pile up manure from cattle or poultry sheds in fields which cattle have access to before it is spread. This does not usually cause any problems, but I have recently come across an incident locally where manure from a broiler house had been dumped on a field then a week later 29 in calf dairy heifers were let in to graze. Over the next ten days sixteen of these animals died from botulism. This is a clostridial organism that can build up in organic matter under acidic conditions. There are no effective treatments for this infection, affected animals are usually just found dead. I think this is one of the conditions that can readily be overlooked as it is difficult and expensive to organize post mortems on adult cattle. Often solitary unexplained deaths are not fully investigated. Beware of manure from poultry sheds especially if it has been allowed to stand on a field for some time. It is safer to use it only on arable fields and not to dump it on fields that stock have access to.

Reporting Abortions

There is still some confusion as to whether or not you need to report bovine abortions to us. The answer is that we need to know about all cows that slip their calf before 271 days of gestation. Ultimately it is DEFRA that decides whether or not samples need to be taken to see if Brucellosis is involved. Sometimes they do not ask for samples if it is the first cow to abort in the past thirty days and if she is a dairy cow currently contributing milk to the bulk tank. In all other cases samples are taken. Even if you think samples will not be taken it is still important to report all abortions as they are all recorded at the Animal Health Office. We do from time to time get cows that show a reaction on the milk ring test to Brucellosis. It seems that this is sometimes because an individual animal is incubating an infection that interferes with the tests that are carried out on the bulk milk samples at the dairy. There is a dairy herd in our area that is under Brucellosis Movement Restrictions at the moment. It is important to monitor any abortions so that any cows that react oddly to the tests can be detected at an early stage.

That Cow in America

For once it is not us that are in the news with BSE. Sometimes it is only when things go wrong that we get an insight as to how things are managed in other countries. Because BSE is such a severe disease I had always assumed that all of the beef exporting countries had controls in place to prevent any possibility that of meat from affected cattle getting into the food chain. It is after all nearly twenty years since it was first diagnosed here and I would have thought that other countries would be careful to ensure that what happened to us could not happen to them.

Feeding Waste Products

Why is it that rendered cattle carcasses are still being fed to poultry and pigs in America and that rendered poultry and pig carcasses are fed back to cattle? It seems to me that it is a fundamental principal of animal husbandry that cattle are not carnivores and should not be fed on the by products of the meat industry. It appears that there is a testing program of sorts operating in America. In the past nine years some 30,000 cattle have been tested for the disease out of 300 million cattle slaughtered. Even though the cow concerned was down and would have been slaughtered hopefully on the farm before being transported to a slaughter house. It is difficult to understand with the modern tests available for BSE how the cow was cleared as fit for human consumption on December the 9^th when the results of the BSE tests were not available until December the 22^nd.

It is reported that the brain and spinal cord from the affected animal has not entered the human food chain, but the rest of the carcass has been sold to three different processing plants so it will be difficult to trace to the eight different states where it eventually went to.

Tracing Cattle

Of more concern is the apparent difficulty of tracing the origin of the cow, especially as it now appears that she had been imported as a calf from Canada. We should admit that the system that we have in place to track the movement of cattle is not one hundred per cent accurate, but at least we can usually determine where cattle have been and when they were there. There is no telling if this animal brought the disease with her from the farm that she was born on or picked the problem up later in her life. So many unanswered questions are bound to damage the confidence of consumers in the American beef industry.

Other Considerations

This has all sorts of implications not just for the meat industry. As far as I am aware there have been no known cases of the new variant CJD in America. Already with this one confirmed imported case of BSE in a single cow alarm bells are sounding as to whether it is a good idea for us to use human blood products imported from America. Since the problems here in admittedly a very small proportion of the human population we have relied on America to supply some blood products that cannot be safely used if the donor has had any contact at all with new variant CJD. The problem is that if these products can no longer come from America it not clear where else they could come from.

Injuries and Poisons

It never ceases to amaze me how easily cattle can injure themselves. Sometimes you can keep animals in buildings for years without trouble then all of a sudden something will happen. We have had healthy calves drown in water troughs. Heifers cut their feet because they have put their legs through a gate where the galvanized sheeting has come away at the bottom. Cows getting a foot trapped down metal grids when the metal has started to corrode. Nails and sharp pieces of metal dropped onto yards have a habit of somehow getting themselves embedded in your cow’s feet. Today I have operated on a calf that ripped the side of her mouth because she got it caught on a redundant door hinge. This hinge was not pointed and dozens of calves have been reared in the same building over the years but somehow this animal managed to do herself serious harm.

Lead Paint

Old doors make good barriers and sometimes they can be used for years before a group of calves start to lick them. It still surprises me how small a quantity of old paint is needed to poison a calf. Old engine oil and grease tubs will also attract calves often with fatal consequences.

Sometimes it is very difficult to find the flakes or any signs of contamination at a post mortem examination. Places where wood has been burnt and disturbed ground from old mine workings can also cause problems when calves first go out in the spring.

There are still lots of hazards to avoid in two thousand and four.

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