DEPRAVED APPETITE. STUMP SUCKING. PICA. LICKING DISEASE.
Common features of group. Ruminants; depraved appetite; objects swallowed: hair balls. Sheep eating wool in winter. Pigs eat bristles. Puppies swallow marbles, etc., wantonly. Solipeds swallow hair, plaster, earth, sand, and lick manger or rack. Fowls eat their feathers. Causes: soil exhaustion, lack of lime, soda, potash, phosphorous; relation to osteo malacia; granitic or sandy soils, peat, muck, causative; digestive disorder; faulty food; yearly breeding and heavy milking; constant stabling; dry seasons. Course: chronic. Lesions; emaciation; anæmia; serous exudate; catarrh of the bowels. Treatment: soil; good fodder; salts of soda, potash and lime, phosphates; tonics; apomorphine. Wool eating; example: digestive disorders; emaciation. Treatment: open air; good fodder; salts of the bones and soft tissues; clip nurses; apomorphine.
Definition. We have here a class of morbid habits, which cannot be referred to any constant lesion or group of lesions, and which appear in certain cases to result from example and to constitute nothing more than a bad habit.
Symptoms. Ruminants without any appreciable cause, lick the clothes of their care-takers, chew and swallow articles of clothing of all kinds, bones, old shoes, gloves, socks, cuffs, collars, small forks, pocket-knives, nails, wires, needles, coins, stones, lumps of clay, hair, which may give rise to secondary troubles of a more or less serious kind. Pregnant cows are especially subject to this infirmity. The small pointed objects like pins, needles, ends of wires, etc., which are mostly taken by accident with the food are especially apt to be entangled in the alveoli of the reticulum and make their way to the heart, with fatal effect, or through the abdominal walls creating a fistula. Hair aggregates with saliva, mucus and phosphates, to form balls in the first two or three stomachs. Other indigestible objects may also become encrusted and prove sources of irritation. Licking the skin of another animal is doubtless at times encouraged by the taste of the salts of perspiration, but in other cases it has all the appearance of a mutual kind service as the cow with itching head will walk up and present it to its fellow which rarely fails to respond to the invitation. Stump licking is not uncommon.
Sheep shut up in the winter get in the habit of chewing each other’s wool, thus virtually depilating their fellows and accumulating wool balls in their stomachs.
Pigs when running at large eat human fæces often infecting themselves with the cysticercus cellulosa, and devour their own or their fellows’ bristles, which form ovoid and irritating aggregations in the stomach.
Puppies are proverbial for swallowing every small object that comes in their way, coal, pebbles, marbles, leather, hair, etc., with the result of inducing nausea and vomiting, or more seriously, wounds of the stomach, gastritis and enteritis. In older dogs the habit is more likely to imply rabies.
Solipeds will lick and swallow each others hair, eat off the hair from each other’s tails and manes, eat their clothing, lick the wall plaster, earth or sand, and even the manger or rack. The last named habits are usually connected with disease.
Fowls can digest almost anything they swallow, but if they take to picking their feathers, they create serious injury to the skin and indirectly to the general health.
Causes and Nature. In general terms it may be said that the causes of depraved appetite are very numerous, so that the trouble must be looked upon as a symptom of many morbid conditions in place of a disease sui generis.
Heredity has been invoked as a cause, mainly, it would appear, because the disease appears enzootically on certain exhausted soils, or in herds kept in the same unhygienic conditions. In such cases the real cause is usually to be found in faulty conditions of soil, water, buildings, food, etc., on the correction of which the trouble disappears. When, however, from a long continuance of unhygienic conditions, a weakness of constitution is transmitted from parent to offspring, such hereditary debility may be accepted as a predisposing factor.
An exhausted soil, lacking especially the elements of lime and phosphorus, is a common cause, though by no means the only one. Nessler who analyzed the hay and water, furnished to cattle suffering from this disease in the Black Forest found a notable absence of the soda salts. In others in which osteo malacia was the prominent symptom the lack was in phosphate of lime as well. In the nature of things the soil that has been continuously cropped to exhaustion is robbed of both earthy and alkaline salts, and the animals fed on its exclusive products suffer not only as regards the nutrition of the bone, but also of the soft parts. Hence Trasbot says that in osteo malacia, pica is never absent. Roloff and Röll hold that it is the first symptom of osteomalacia. In South Africa where the land has been cropped with oats year after year without manure and as long as it will bear, the disease became prevalent in the street car horses fed on the oats, and was corrected by the addition of phosphates, or phosphate bearing food, to the ration. In the older dairying farms of New York which have been kept under grass for a great length of time, and all the milk products sold off, depraved appetite in all its forms is quite frequent. Where the land is originally light and sandy and naturally deficient in lime, osteo malacia is often a concurrent disorder. The two conditions may however occur independently of each other, and especially may pica appear alone, in keeping with the greater solubility of the soda and potash salts and the readiness with which these can be washed out of the soil, while the less soluble lime salts in part remain.
Lemcke, Haubner and Siedamgrotzky attribute the disease to a nervous disorder. Lemcke indeed traces the disorder to a lack of phosphorus, and claims that osteomalacia only supervenes where the rheumatic diathesis is also present.
It may be shortly stated that the disease prevails especially on granitic or sandy soils, or on those which are mainly composed of organic debris (peat, muck). Limestone soils and those which contain any considerable proportion of potash or soda are usually exempt.
Digestive disorder though starting from a different point may tend to the same end. A hyperacidity of the stomach has been observed to coincide with the malady, and by interfering with easy and normal digestion, it may stand in the way of such assimilation as is necessary to vigorous health.
Faulty food operates in a similar manner. The exhausted soils, and their products deficient in alkaline and earthy salts have been already referred to; we must also note the evil effect of fibrous fodders, the main nutritive elements of which have been washed out by intemperate weather after they were cut, the rank aqueous products of wet or swampy soils, the fibrous and siliceous plants (rushes, carex, equisetums, etc.) which grow on poor, wet or soured soils, the innutritious and fermented products of beet sugar factories, and generally the spoilt food which has undergone fermentation.
Yearly breeding and constant milking, by undermining the general health, predisposes so strongly that in many cases the affection is seen in dairy cows, while oxen and young cattle escape. The last period of gestation when the demands for the growing calf are greatest, is the period of especial danger.
Permanent stabling which denies the invigorating influence of sun, exercise and pure air contributes toward the general debility and therefore, in animals that are closely stabled for the winter the spring is especially to be feared, when compulsory inactivity, poor feeding, gestation and milking have combined to reduce the system.
Dry seasons have been noticed to increase the affection manifestly by reducing the supply of food.
Course. The affection is chronic and unless arrested by the supervention of more favorable conditions, may last for a year or more. Spontaneous recovery may set in when turned out to pasturage and open air life, and especially if a rich grain feeding is added. Without change in the conditions however, the tendency is to a fatal result.
Lesions. The victims of the disorder are emaciated, the fatty tissue contains a yellow serum, there is little blood, and that is thin and watery and coagulates loosely, the muscles are pale and flabby, and the gastro-intestinal mucous membrane is the seat of catarrh.
Treatment. To treat rationally and successfully we must adapt the measures to the obvious causes. When the soil has been scourged and exhausted, a change of pasture, and of land used for hay or soiling crops is the first consideration. If these cannot be secured then grain and seeds rich in protein, and alkaline and earthy salts should be added to the ration. Wheat bran, middlings, peas, beans, cotton seed meal, linseed meal, rapecake may be named among available resorts, or in their absence, daily doses of phosphate of lime, and sodium chloride or bicarbonate, or potash salts may be allowed, or even bone dust.
If imperfect digestion is a manifest factor, sodium chloride, or potassium chloride, calcium phosphate, iron and bitters will serve a good end. In hyperacidity, limewater, chalk, or magnesia may be given. If the digestion is torpid, hydrochloric acid with bitters may be resorted to.
Feser and especially Lemcke strongly recommend apomorphia. It is used hypodermically in doses of 2 grains for horse or cow repeated daily for three days.
Secondary Symptoms in Wool-eating Lambs. Lambs from two to six weeks old especially such as suck ewes with woolly udders (merino, Cotswold) first swallow the wool inadvertently, and then acquire a liking for the saline matters in the abundant yolk (merino), till finally the accumulating wool balls produce digestive and nervous disorder and a craving for the indulgence. Thus the breed must be considered in estimating the symptoms. For the same reason the wool about the hips or elsewhere soiled with salts of the urine or liquid fæces prove attractive to the victim. The proximity of other wool eaters is another cause which starts others to follow the bad example. The general conditions of debility, exhausted soil, and the absence of alkaline and earthy salts must be borne in mind. So too with prolonged confinement indoors in winter, the absence of invigorating exercise and the restriction of the animals (dams) to food which is deficient in saline matters.
Beyond the mere eating of the wool and the destruction of fleeces, the lambs do not usually suffer seriously. But if the consumption of wool is excessive the accumulating balls of the size of marbles in the stomach, and the blocking of the pylorus and small intestine, may give rise to intermittent constipations and diarrhœas, deranged digestion, muco-enteritis, mucous covered stools, loss of condition, emaciation and retarded development.
Treatment consists first in the securing of a more healthy regimen. This is but one of the evils of the close winter confinement of an animal preëminently adapted to freedom and exercise. Turning out in a wide range, especially if pasture is available, is a prime consideration. The separation from the flock, of the first wool eaters, will check the propagation of the vice by imitation. Food that is defective in one or more constituents must be supplemented by that which will correct the deficiency. Salt, potassic salts and above all phosphate of lime or bone meal will sometimes benefit. May recommends the separation of the lambs from the ewes except when nursing, three times a day. Finally Lemcke claims for apomorphia the same curative effect as in other animals. The dose is 2 grains, subcutem, as in the cow and may be repeated three days in succession.